


All of me wants all of you

by hammerhorror



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier Are Best Friends, California, Coming Out, Fix-It, Love Confessions, M/M, New York City, Not Actually Unrequited Love, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:15:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hammerhorror/pseuds/hammerhorror
Summary: In the months after Derry, Richie and Eddie consider the pros and cons of Los Angeles and New York City.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 57
Kudos: 108





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so. i was thinking, "i would love to write something where richie and eddie have lunch at my favorite diner in new york city!" and then i thought, "if i don't write this right now i will die" and i thought, "this is turning out to be a much bigger project than i originally intended." 
> 
> general content warning for the usual canon-typical homophobia, mental health and mental health adjacent issues, implied/referenced drug use, beverly being unhinged. 
> 
> title from the sufjan stevens song.

As the seven of them cleansed themselves in the quarry, Richie noticed that Eddie was holding his arm strangely, bent and held tight up against his stomach. It was the only thing Richie could focus on. In the midst of their twisted baptismal renewal, what Mike would later describe as the birth of his new self, Richie only saw Eddie. 

He watched Beverly dive in for a hug and Eddie only stretch out his left arm to take her in, keeping his right tucked safely against himself. It was unlike Eddie to be so hesitant in tending to an injury, so it was strange that he waited this long to even admit he was in pain at all. Sitting at the water’s edge, soaking wet hair carelessly pushed over to one side, looking so beautiful that it was quite literally painful for Richie to acknowledge, Eddie quietly asked Richie to drive him to the hospital.

“Why did you pick me?” Richie wanted to ask, because he never stopped being sickeningly desperate for attention and Eddie’s attention directed towards Richie currently felt like the spoils of war granted to him after making it out of the sewers alive. But now was really not the time to try and wring validation and affection and love out of Eddie like a washrag. Richie nodded and said, “Yeah, Eds, anything you need. I’ll do anything.”

It turned out to only be a fracture, not a full break, his arm was placed in a sling and he got a few stitches in his face for his trouble. 

The doctor asked Eddie about the previous break in his arm and _hmmm_ ’d and _ohhh_ ’d sympathetically when Eddie said it was a childhood injury, that he was playing somewhere he shouldn’t have been playing, and his impulsive friend tried to set the break. He didn’t mention, of course, that this impulsive friend was sitting in the room with them. Richie shuffled in his seat uncomfortably, but then he locked eyes with Eddie, and Eddie didn’t look upset, or remorseful, or even like he was in pain. He smiled at Richie, like they were sharing an inside joke.

As they sat together in the hospital parking garage, gathering their thoughts and poking around on their phones, Richie looked over at Eddie in the passenger seat of his rental and thought that in this moment, Eddie looked like he hadn’t aged a day since they were thirteen. Furrowed brow, big eyes, unfortunate arm injury—oh, Eddie was talking and Richie wasn’t even listening.

“… and I should have asked for a bone density test, just to be safe, just to make sure my bones aren’t brittle or I’m not deficient in something. In fact, I can’t believe the doctor didn’t even suggest one, what is this? I’m fracturing my arm out of nowhere at forty? I’m fucking forty, not dead, not some geriatric fuck who fractures something every time he gets out of bed.”

“I wouldn’t say it was out of nowhere,” Richie said. “You hit the ground pretty hard. You know, when.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, calming down slightly, sinking back into the seat. “When.”

They weren’t ready to talk about it. So what? Who said they had to talk about things—they had gone twenty-something years without talking about anything, what was one more day? There was no precedent, really, for _I had this extremely gruesome vision where you died and then I barely managed to pull you out of the way in time. How do we move on from that?_

So Richie decided to change the subject in a way that resembled something like emotional self-harm, because Richie was but also wasn’t an idiot, and he knew how this was going to end. He had spent the entirety of his childhood happy to gut himself for Eddie and the tradition was demanding to be continued now at forty. On the drive back to the townhouse, he took a detour to the Kissing Bridge. Eddie was very quiet as Richie recounted the years of crazed adolescent love. Almost too quiet, too peaceful, like Eddie Kaspbrak as Richie had always known him had been lobotomized and was now a docile non-person.

Richie held his breath and waited for Eddie to say literally anything. Eddie ran his finger over the _+_ and was silent for some time. Then he said, “I’m glad you told me.” It ended just like that, on a period, whereas Richie had wanted that sentence to end on a comma, to indicate that there was something to move towards.

But Eddie needed to call his wife, and Eddie needed to get back home, and Eddie needed to figure out what was going to happen with his job. Eddie had a lot to worry about. Richie did, too, but he had the privilege of having a lot to worry about that could easily be ignored. Because Richie was a hack comedian having a mental breakdown and could, kind of, do whatever he wanted with little consequence besides further destruction of his bullshit career. At the moment, with Eddie in front of him, crouched down and staring at their initials and the undeniable proof that they at least existed in the same lifetime, Richie did not really care about much else.

They went back to the townhouse and Eddie was very gentle towards Richie, it seemed sort of like pity, but Eddie had never been known to take pity on anyone—he was rough and aggressive in his affection— so there was no telling what was going through his head. But it made Richie deeply uncomfortable, because it wasn’t natural, and this was the last thing he had wanted to happen.

“We’re okay, right?” Richie asked, watching Eddie pack up the remainder of his things.

“We—yeah, of course, Richie. Seriously,” Eddie said, pointedly avoiding any eye contact, focusing very intently on his comically overpacked toiletry bag. There must have been ten prescription medications in there. Richie didn’t have time to try and figure out if Eddie had developed a genuine pill dependency sometime over the last twenty-something years. All he had time for was making sure Eddie still wanted him around. “I promise. You’re—you know, you’re my best friend. Even after all this time.”

“Cool,” Richie said. “Yeah. You’re my best friend, too, Eddie.”

Eddie left Derry in a hurry. Stan poked and prodded at Richie to talk about it, but he refused. The remaining six of them had drinks together and began to leave one by one. Richie stayed behind with Mike to tie up loose ends with the Derry Police Department regarding the death of Henry Bowers. No charges were pressed. He bought a ticket home, begged Mike to come with him so he wouldn’t be lonely, and tried to figure out how to begin the rest of his life in proverbial spitting distance of Eddie Kaspbrak. 

Beverly had a thick skin.

She came to stay with Richie for a while, had already been to Georgia to stay with Stan and Patty for two weeks, and she indulged Richie quite a bit in his self-destructive habits, because she was currently indulging herself in her own self-destructive habits and she figured it was only fair.

“The stuff people are saying on Twitter—you know, that stuff isn’t real. It’s okay if you look at it,” she said.

They were sitting on Richie’s bed having dinner together. They’d ordered asada fries from this dumpy Mexican joint. Richie didn’t think it was dumpy, that was just how it was described as Yelp. Everyone knew those places served the best food. Beverly was constructing a perfect bite with all the components—fries, asada, guacamole, pico de gallo, cheese, and crema. She asked for no cilantro and claimed it was because she had an allergy. Neither took the opportunity to take a jab at Eddie.

“Kids are just so fucking mean,” Richie said, locking his phone when the verbal abuse in his Twitter mentions became too much for him to handle. “Were we that mean? When we were kids?”

Beverly hummed thoughtfully. “I think so. Like, I probably would have harassed celebrities on Twitter if it had been around when I was a kid. I hated—fuck, I still hate, fucking Morrissey. I would have told that guy to kill himself daily.”

“I guess you did have a pretty big mean streak sometimes,” Richie said.

“God, yeah. I had the biggest chip on my shoulder.”

“I mean… rightfully so, in my opinion,” Richie said, because he couldn’t possibly imagine anyone else in his life who deserved to hate the world more than Beverly Marsh. 

Beverly shrugged and took another bite of her fries. “I didn’t really think the world was out to get _me_ , personally, but I just felt like the world was so evil. Even outside of Derry. Things just seemed so random and cruel. I didn’t ask to be born, you know? I never wanted that. So I decided to make it everyone’s problem.”

“I’m glad you were born, Bev,” Richie said, too sincerely for Beverly’s liking, because she made a face.

“Shut up,” she said, biting down on her bottom lip. “You’re gonna make me cry into my fucking food, asshole.”

It took Beverly a few days to realize that Richie and Eddie were radio silent with each other, though how she managed to piece it together with such little evidence was beyond Richie. Nothing had changed about her over the years, she was still a bull in a china shop when it came to confronting people, but Richie was shocked at her aggression, nonetheless.

“What’s the deal with you and Eddie? I can tell something is wrong, so don’t lie to me,” she said at the kitchen table, feet pulled up in her chair, breathing in the steam from a hot cup of chamomile tea.

“Well,” Richie said, “you know.”

“No, Richie, I really don’t know. All I know is that you took him to the hospital and then he left and now you two aren’t talking to each other,” Beverly said. “It’s kind of obvious that you aren’t acknowledging each other in the group chat.” She had two fluorescent hair clips pinning her hair back on either side of her head, as she had just stumbled out of bed and was still in her vulnerable morning state. It seemed extremely eighties to Richie. Maybe they were regressing.

“I told him,” Richie said slowly, and that’s really all he needed to say before Beverly’s eyes were widening to a comical size. “That I loved him when we were kids. And still do.”

“Babe,” Beverly said.

“Yeah,” Richie said.

“Can I say I knew it?” she asked.

“Sure. I don’t care.”

“God, I fucking knew it! And you never told me. Unbelievable.”

Beverly had only stayed away from Derry for a few short months after that summer. Her aunt made the sacrifice of moving her back so that she could be with her friends, because she was struggling to acclimate to life in Portland. Struggling to acclimate meant that she was flying into terrifying episodes of rage and fighting other students at her new school, which was probably a trauma response to everything she had been forced to endure from birth in addition to the clown shit.

The first week of Beverly’s return had been spent giving her a refresher on the things she’d started to forget in her absence. She and Richie had always gotten along well, and they spent this time smoking together and shooting the shit at the clubhouse, just the two of them, as she recalled her lost memories. 

She had asked a lot of questions about Eddie, like Richie was some type of authority on the subject of Eddie Kaspbrak. He had just assumed at the time that it was because Eddie could be rather prickly and difficult to have a conversation with that wasn’t completely infuriating, but in hindsight she had probably been trying to scope out if they were dating or not.

“That’s rough, Richie,” she continued. “That’s really rough. You should try and talk to him. You don’t want him to think there’s anything wrong. That you’re upset with him, or anything. And I’m positive he isn’t upset with you. That just doesn’t seem like him.”

“ _I’m_ the one who deserves to be avoidant right now, _I’m_ the one who has to worry that I made him uncomfortable. He could just as easily try and talk to me,” Richie said, feeling irrationally defensive. In what universe was Eddie the more pitiable one in this situation? 

Whenever Richie and Eddie had one of their more serious spats during their volatile teenage years, Richie always felt like everyone gravitated over to Eddie without waiting to hear Richie’s side of the story. It was a particularly heavy betrayal when Beverly did this, which she did only sometimes, because she tried to stay diplomatic between the two of them. Once Eddie’s feelings had been hurt by Richie, he would just stand there with that doleful look on his face, like he wasn’t just as capable of being inhumanly mean and cruel himself, and everyone bought it. 

“Yeah, but he isn’t going to,” Beverly said. 

Richie didn’t want to go so far as to say that Eddie’s very status of being married to a woman was evidence that he was a master at repression, because it wasn’t right to make any type of assumption about Eddie. It was wrong to _assume_ that Eddie was gay because they kissed each other a couple of times when they were drunk as teenagers—a fact that Richie only remembered on his flight back to California, that caused him to sob so heavily he thought he was going to throw up in his own lap. It would have been easier to remember that before telling Eddie everything. A confession, a gentle rejection, and the knowledge that at some point in Eddie’s life, at least for a moment, he felt _something_ for Richie was painful when experienced in that particular order. 

“I think Eddie is very good at avoiding things,” he said after a meaningful pause.

“Like you aren’t!” Beverly said, slamming her mug down, spilling tea on the table. “You—your whole fucking life, Richie.”

His whole fucking life? He had a nice place in Silver Lake. A reasonably successful career. Money in the bank. A team of people who were trying their hardest to clean up the mess he made bombing in front of a live audience and running off to Maine to willingly dig up his own childhood trauma for the greater good. Up until recently, he had no real friends. He could not maintain a relationship for more than a few months. It was no way to live. And Beverly had caught on to his lack of emotional fulfillment within a few weeks of knowing his adult self. World’s smallest violin, though, right?

“You’ll call him,” Beverly said. It was an order.

It was no great secret that Richie had an addictive personality.

Born long before the era of parents happily overmedicating their children, he received his ADHD diagnose about twenty years too late. As a result, he had spent a significant amount of his late adolescent and adult life drunk, on coke, engaging in frequent, shameful hookups, and seeking the attention of anyone and everyone in his line of vision even if it meant pissing them off to get it. He would probably take his arm off with a hacksaw if it promised to produce an iota of dopamine.

The day after his conversation with Beverly, he decided that he was going to rip the bandage right off and not prolong the worst of the misery and awkward in-between he was now associating with Eddie’s very existence. Beverly was taking a drunken afternoon nap and Richie had nothing to do but mope around the house, so he may as well dig his fingers straight into the open wound of it all.

When he finally swallowed back his urge to vomit everywhere and called Eddie, and Eddie actually _answered_ , sounding happy to hear him no less, Richie realized that he would very likely literally die if he couldn’t hear Eddie’s voice every single day of his life.

“It’s nice to hear from you, Rich, I’m sorry I haven’t—well, it’s been… not great,” Eddie said. “Honestly, it’s been a fucking nightmare. I came back to a mountain of work, and you know, I’ve learned that people aren’t super sympathetic to finding out you were stabbed in the face. They mostly just think it’s weird. Except for this one intern, who asks way too many questions.”

Richie laughed at that, and then Eddie laughed, like he was physically releasing whatever tension he had been holding in when Richie called. If Richie were a poet he would be thinking of, like, church bells or something like that. The tender plucking of a harp. Or, whatever, Richie didn’t really know about any of that stuff. Whatever beautiful sounds out there existed and inspired people to sit down and write a shit ton of poems about other people, Eddie’s laugh was comparable. If John Keats’d had a phone and could have called that girl he was in love with and heard her laugh, he would have lost his fucking mind. 

“I’m actually at the office right now. Working late. Indefinitely. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

“Well, Bev is here,” Richie said. “Mooching off of me.”

“As one does when they are a wealthy, successful fashion designer.” Of course, they both knew the truth, that Beverly was evading her husband and the responsibility of her impending divorce, and everything it meant for her company, and Ben, for as long as she could before it became foolish.

“You’re probably next, so watch out.”

“Jesus Christ, I can’t imagine Myra and Beverly in the same room,” Eddie said. He sounded sort of like he was talking to himself. Richie wondered what it must mean to him—the idea that his wife could not, would not peacefully coexist with his closest friends.

It felt wrong for Richie to indulge in this topic, because it was wrong for him to take it upon himself to dole out criticism of Myra Kaspbrak’s character. He didn’t know her. Of course, he felt like he did, since as far as he knew, she was exactly like Sonia Kaspbrak. But again, that was assumptive and presumptuous, and Richie was apparently trying not to be exactly that anymore.

“You should, uh,” Eddie said. “You should visit sometime. I don’t know how you feel about New York City, but if you want. You’re welcome here, with. With me.”

“Oh. Yeah, Eds—”

“Not my name.”

“—that would be nice. Never really got the hang of New York, though. It’s very… aware of itself.”

“Wh—what does that even mean, aware of itself? It is not, it’s just a place!” Eddie said defensively. Richie could hear him aggressively typing in the background, so the sling was probably off.

“I think everyone in New York City thinks they’re the main character in a movie about a writer having a strained relationship with his wife or, like, some artsy cokeheads, or something like that,” Richie said, and he could tell Eddie was getting riled up, and it felt nice.

“That’s so not true! That’s just something people say. They visit New York City once and they think they have it all figured out.”

“You are more than welcome to say whatever the fuck you want about Los Angeles, if you want,” Richie said diplomatically.

“I’ve never been to Los Angeles,” Eddie said.

“You should come to Los Angeles,” Richie said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said easily. “I should.”

Richie publicly coming out made some waves of the positive sort, enough that Steve was happy, and those waves were helping to salvage his career _enough_ , but it wasn’t some major career-affirming, status-boosting move, in Richie’s opinion. It was just something that needed to happen and if he got some work out of it then okay, fine. This possibly had something to do with the new anxiety medication he had been prescribed upon returning home from Derry, but whatever, Richie wasn’t going to complain about peaceful acceptance.

His Twitter mentions got a little nicer beyond the expected unhinged homophobes, so they weren’t as fun to go through with Beverly anymore. He mourned the loss of their favorite bonding activity. She offered to start up some burner accounts and send him homophobic epithets, if he wanted her to. 

“It’s a good thing,” Steve said, jabbing a forkful of pasta towards Richie’s chest, “that people are still sympathetic to gay meltdowns.”

Beverly laughed. Richie had insisted she join them for lunch and told Steve she was after his job, so this was her test run. They were at an Italian eatery on Melrose that Steve always demanded they go to, even though Richie wasn’t a fan of Italian food. “You’re sending me to an early grave, Tozier, so we eat where I decide we eat,” is what he always said.

“I agree with Steve,” Beverly said. “It’s still a big deal when characters on TV are gay. When they come out, it’s a big deal. I still cry when it happens, personally.”

“Yes. A very big deal,” Steve said. “But you have to walk the fucking line from now on, Richie.”

“Walk the fucking line—what are you even talking about? I’m just gonna, like, do what I always do, man,” Richie said, annoyed.

“Not a good idea,” Beverly said seriously, and Steve laughed.

“I like her. You wanna be my assistant?” Steve asked her.

“Well, depending on how my divorce goes, maybe,” Beverly said with a shrug, taking a sip of wine.

Steve made a sympathetic noise and reached out to pat her hand. Since when was Steve nice? That got the two of them started on a conversation about divorce and left Richie a bit of a reprieve, a precious moment of people not barking in his face about everything bad he had ever done and what he needed to do to fix it.

He thought about Eddie, because he was always thinking about Eddie lately. Beverly was going to be leaving soon. She wanted to stay with Bill and Audra for a few days, which Richie found surprising, but Beverly was always full of surprises. She wanted to track Mike down, she wanted to visit Eddie, and she spoke nothing of Ben.

Richie and Ben were talking rather frequently through text, and Ben seemed to be fine with whatever it was Beverly was doing. He was talking about going on some spiritual retreat and this made sense to Richie, considering his hermit status made him seem like a guy who cared about chakra alignment and energy and other appropriated new age concepts. He was sincere and attentive to Richie, even though he didn’t exactly know what had happened with Eddie, it seemed that he had some idea. Ben was a good guy. He was a great guy, really, and Richie wondered how the Kissing Bridge conversation with Eddie would have gone were Richie a little bit more like Ben.

With Beverly leaving and Richie’s anticipated devastating loneliness, maybe it wouldn’t seem too weird to see if Eddie wanted to visit and stay for a while. There was a foghorn going off in Richie’s head letting him know that this was a catastrophically bad idea. Eddie, extremely close, sleeping in the guest room, generally existing in Richie’s vicinity and making him feel patently fucking insane. But Richie had never really made decisions based off what was a good idea and what was a bad idea. It was mostly based off _what is going to give me the deepest sense of instant gratification at this very moment_? and, well.

Steve paid for Beverly’s meal, which Richie thought was nice. He was starting to wonder if maybe everyone was secretly a nice person but himself.

The next time Richie and Eddie talked, Eddie didn’t sound quite as happy as he had before, and that gave Richie this sick and twisted feeling of hopefulness. That was wrong, he knew this, but he was tired of constant self-flagellation over wanting Eddie to not be married to a carbon copy of his own abusive mother. Or wanting Eddie to not be married to anyone at all, selfishly. 

“I’m exhausted,” Eddie said. There was that same furious typing in the background, letting Richie know he was still in the office. It was well into the evening on the east coast. “This whole thing… missing work and coming back with these weird injuries, it’s turned me into some crazy version of myself. I’m trying so hard to please everyone around me. My coworkers, my boss. My wife. I used to just do things for my own neurotic satisfaction, but now I’m living off the approval of others.”

“Welcome to the club,” Richie said.

“Oh, this is what it feels like to be you? I’m so sorry, Richie, that’s horrible,” Eddie said, with a slight bite to it, that slightest bit of sarcasm that made Richie feel normal. “Oh—holy shit, Rich, I’m the worst. I didn’t even congratulate you—”

“God, no. You have no idea how much emotional intimacy I’ve had to fend off since I did it. Just do your thing. Be an asshole. I need one person in my life to be cool,” Richie said.

Eddie was silent for a moment. “Fine,” he said, finally. “I hope the young people are eviscerating you on the internet.”

“They are, but in, like, a loving way now.”

“Beverly told me you were nearly _cancelled_ or something like that.”

“You don’t know what cancelled means?”

“In the context of young people on the internet, no. I don’t. Sorry for being forty.”

“You’re a total square. It’s where kids collectively decide someone is irredeemably problematic. But now there’s this level of irony to me and the best thing, honestly, is just that people are talking about it. A lot of in-fighting among young gays. They’re like, _aren’t we tired of self-loathing gay men yet?_ And, _if we have this kind of attitude, it’s going to drive people like Richie Tozier further into the closet_!”

“This is all very complicated,” Eddie said sincerely. “Well, in any case, I’m here for you. You know that, right?”

“Of course,” Richie said. “I know that, Eds.”

“So, I hear Beverly is going to stay with Bill and Audra for a while,” Eddie said, probably sensing that it was time to change the subject.

“Do you think that’s weird?” Richie asked, lowering his voice to make sure Beverly didn’t overhear him from the guest room. There was little to no chance, but he was still terrified of her and his memories of her teenage warpath. “Because I think it’s really fucking weird.”

“Totally weird,” Eddie agreed.

“I mean—because, they, you know.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“Right,” Richie said. It felt like being a little kid again. Those weird, quickfire conversations he and Eddie would have where they really didn’t have to say much of anything at all, like they could read each other’s thoughts.

“I’m sure Beverly knows what she’s doing. It would also be weird if she skipped over Bill in her journey to crash with everyone. It would hurt his feelings.”

“And are we all not living in constant pursuit of preserving Bill Denbrough’s delicate feelings?” Richie asked.

“God,” Eddie laughed, “you always used to give him such a hard time in high school. You were so mean to him.”

Since reuniting with everyone, Richie was having to deal with frequent episodes of becoming unexpectedly awash with humiliating childhood memories, and a lot of those memories were humiliating only because he had been a truly unimaginable asshole for no goddamn reason. So, yes, Eddie was right—Richie had given Bill a hard time in high school. Bill was always rightfully prone to melancholy, but it got worse once they were teenagers. Though Eddie would likely never admit it now, his role in this dynamic was babying Bill, siding with Bill during arguments, coddling Bill in his own weird way and _Jesus Christ_ , it made Richie so jealous he thought he would die.

“He was no fun in high school,” Richie said. “Always moping, listening to the Cure, writing those weird poems.”

“You are such an asshole, Richie, he was—he was coping!” Eddie said, but he wasn’t particularly heated over this, because Richie wasn’t being particularly mean-spirited. At their reunion dinner, the seven of them had plenty of laughs about Bill’s notorious almost-goth phase.

“Yeah, coping by being absolutely insufferable,” Richie continued, just to keep Eddie going.

“He—holy shit, remember when you had that fight with him at Stan’s house? Because, man… what was it? Oh! Beverly went on a date with Jeremy Hopkins and Bill was being a total asshole to her about it. He was jealous.”

“God,” Richie groaned. “Yeah, now I remember. Stan’s mom was so mad. She snatched me up by the arm. I was like a full foot taller than her, too. And then Beverly got pissed at _me_! Not Bill! Me!”

“Oh, yeah! She was like, _who the fuck do you think you are, you think I want you to defend my honor_? That was hilarious.”

“Shit, Beverly was always throwing me for a loop. She always got mad at me when I least expected it, but she was always on my team when no one else was. I’ve never met someone with worse emotional regulation besides maybe myself.” More details of that episode were becoming clearer the longer they talked about it. Beverly had gruffly apologized the next day with a carton of cigarettes. Eddie had walked Richie home after the fight to make sure—

“I was convinced Mrs. Uris dislocated your shoulder,” Eddie said, as if he and Richie had recovered the exact same moment at the exact same time. “I wanted you to go to the hospital.”

“Yeah,” Richie said quietly. “You were the only one who wanted anything to do with me for the rest of the night.”

“I thought it was nice. That you wanted to defend Beverly,” Eddie said.

Eddie had gone up to Richie’s room with him and demanded that he do arm stretches to make sure his shoulder bone was still intact and undamaged. Then they had fallen asleep together in Richie’s bed. Richie wondered if thinking back on that night tugged and tore at Eddie’s heart, too, but he didn’t ask.

Embarrassingly but predictably, Richie ended up crying the day Beverly left and she was nice enough to refrain from making fun of him. She wouldn’t even let him drive her to Bill’s house, opting to take an Uber, and that made him feel left out, like he was a little kid again. She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek again and again. She promised to come back soon.

“You’re going to marry Ben and forget about me,” Richie said woefully.

“Lord,” Beverly sighed, and she left it at that. As her Uber pulled out of the driveway, she waved at him from the backseat and he watched and waited until she was completely obscured in the distance. 

Richie dragged himself back into the house and collapsed on the couch in the living room. One of Beverly’s weird British human-interest pieces was still playing on the television, something offensively insensitive about bariatric surgery. Richie decided to keep it on for background noise. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket, and he opened his contacts, and his thumb hovered over Eddie’s name.

It was a little over a month since Derry, and they were now talking almost every day, usually when Eddie was working late at the office. Only a week prior had Eddie begun mentioning his wife in conversation.

It started like this: _Myra won’t let me have a cat_.

Richie had mentioned that he was going to be lonely after Beverly left him and maybe he should adopt a cat, which Eddie thought was a good idea, because he loved cats. However, Myra refused to allow any pets in their home. And when Eddie said this, it made Richie feel nearly gleeful and then extremely guilty.

“Are you allergic?” Richie asked.

“I don’t think so,” Eddie said, “but who knows,” which Richie thought was sort of a strange answer. From then on Eddie would occasionally, reticently, reveal small details about his life with Myra. Objectively, it sounded fucking miserable. Richie was careful not to encourage Eddie too much, because he would be doing so with an agenda, and he wasn’t going to be that type of person. It was insincere, and it was cruel, and Eddie didn’t deserve that.

Richie very suddenly remembered the barn cats on the Hanlon farm and how much Eddie had loved them. There was a batch of kittens once with a runt that had grey and cream-colored fur and Eddie especially adored her. Mike’s grandfather was always telling him to take her home and raise her as a housecat, but Sonia would have lost her mind if he had even asked. In the end, the cat ran away and Eddie was devastated. Richie wondered if Eddie had remembered the cat sometime between coming home from Derry and their conversation. It all made Richie feel overwhelmingly dizzy with affection for Eddie the same way he felt when they were kids and he watched Eddie gently scratch the barn cats behind their ears, even the most temperamental ones.

All he could think was that he wanted Eddie in any way, close by, next to him, one room over, whatever. He wanted to call him, and he wanted to talk to him, unashamedly greedy, and he wanted to see him, and he wanted to open his home indefinitely, forever, for Eddie to come and go as he pleased. If he could never have Eddie permanently, he would allow Eddie to do what he wanted at his own discretion. He wanted to tell Eddie this. He was one phone call away from telling Eddie this.

One of the many therapists Richie had seen over the years tried to teach him how to develop better impulse control. Assessing risk, counting to ten, shit like that. He couldn’t do any of that, it was too boring. But what he ended up doing was scrolling through his contacts down to Stan’s name and calling him instead.

“Hey, Richie,” Stan said, and Richie could tell he was on speakerphone.

“You busy?” Richie asked. “Because you sound busy. I can call back—” But Richie didn’t want to call back, because ending his call with Stan was a gateway to starting a call with Eddie, which was a gateway to being a stupid idiot.

“Just cleaning up around the kitchen,” Stan said, sounding very comforting and warm and domestic. God, Stan was probably the perfect husband. “Everything okay?”

“Not… really. No. Not at all, I guess. Can I tell you something?” Richie asked.

“You don’t even have to ask, Richie.”

“Okay. Back in Derry, I told Eddie something. Important.”

“Ah,” Stan said, knowing.

“And now I’m, like, obsessively craving his attention.”

“So nothing has changed,” Stan said.

“Come on, Stan.”

“What? I feel like we’ve picked up right where we left off when we were eighteen. Is he acting weird with you, or…?”

“No, it’s nothing like that. I just feel like I’m going fucking insane. Just, every time I talk to him, I feel like I’m going to die. It’s like I’m a teenager again. And Stanley, I can’t. I can’t feel like that, for my sake, but also for his sake, it really isn’t fair for him. If I’m going to be a part of his life… Stan, did I do the wrong thing? Did I make a mistake?”

“It’s hard to say,” Stan said. There was the sound of silverware clattering and a drawer slamming shut. “I just think that with Eddie, your willingness to… disembowel yourself for him may end up hurting you one day. How many times did we have this conversation when we were kids?”

Truthfully, Richie didn’t really know how to answer that. If he’d had similar conversations with Stan before, he wasn’t currently remembering any of them. His understanding of his relationship with Eddie as a teenager was revealing itself to him in incoherent piecemeal fragments, but he had yet to recall a time when he talked about it to anyone else. 

“Do you not remember?” Stan asked. “By the time we graduated high school, it was near constant. Eddie would go through these peaks and valleys episodes with you, and it just killed you.”

“Yeah, well, Eddie was kind of an asshole. That could have been about—about anything, really, not necessarily about, you know.”

“Oh, Richie,” Stan sighed. Richie could practically hear the patronizing shake of his head. There was no reason to believe that Stan would be making shit up or exaggerating any of this. Richie was silent for a moment, thinking on it as hard as he could manage. Stan said, “Remember that one time we talked about it in the clubhouse—”

“Fuck,” Richie said, exhaling. “Yeah, after I went on that date with Kimberly Johnson and Eddie was so fucking mad at me. But he wouldn’t talk to me. We didn’t talk for a week.”

“And you got drunk on some vodka we had stashed away and fell asleep in the hammock. Your parents were hysterical. They thought you had run away from home.”

“And you found me.”

“Indeed, I did. In Eddie’s defense, it was pretty mean of you to ask Kimberly Johnson out on a date two days after—”

And there it was. As clear and precise as if it were happening right in front of Richie’s eyes. His parents were out of town, so everyone came over with booze and weed. They set up camp in the den, dragging the television from the living room and laying sleeping bags on the floor. Eddie ended up having a pretty bad high, so he retreated up to Richie’s room to calm down. Richie followed him up, they sat together in silence until Eddie was grounded, and Eddie kissed Richie. It was a hesitant, bashful kiss and Richie could distinctly remember the feeling of his heart pounding in his chest, the flush of his face. He’d gotten that same feeling seeing Eddie again their first night back in Derry.

That night in Richie’s bedroom, they ended up making out until Beverly called up the stairs asking if everything was okay. Eddie looked at Richie with that _look_ , that disarming bug-eyed sadness that seemed inappropriate for the situation. He called down to Beverly that everything was fine, and then he went downstairs, leaving Richie alone.

The next morning, Eddie refused to talk about it, which left Richie feeling understandably hurt. He then decided that the best course of action was to ask Kimberly Johnson, a sweet girl from his homeroom period, out on a date the next day at school. He did it to see if it would spite Eddie. Just to see if it meant anything at all to him. Just to see if he would get upset. It did spite Eddie, it had meant something to him, and he got horribly upset.

“Eddie wouldn’t _talk_ to me, Stanley. _He_ kissed me in my bedroom and then never wanted to talk about it again. It’s always about how I hurt Eddie. It’s never about how Eddie hurt me. He just,” Richie said, wondering if there was any point hashing it all out again—Stan very clearly remembered more than Richie did presently. “He always managed to get under my skin. Just burrow deep down in there. God, he was infuriating. Maybe he still is, who knows. Maybe he’s, like, a shitty fucking person and I’m in a honeymoon phase of having him back in my life. It would be easier that way.”

“I know that he hurt you, Richie. I would never deny that,” Stan said gently. “I think he got scared easily, and the two of you reached an impasse. But you didn’t do yourself any favors, always lashing out and trying to upset him on purpose.” He paused. “I don’t think Eddie’s a bad person, and I don’t think _you_ really think that, either.”

“Yeah,” Richie said dumbly, feeling indescribably guilty and unable to say anything else. He could remember how fucked up and happy he felt knowing he managed to make Eddie feel anything, even if it was unbridled rage, because he was so terrified of the idea of Eddie feeling nothing towards him at all. He lived in constant fear of Eddie deciding he was done entertaining Richie’s pathetic affection for him, that he was sick and tired of Richie following him around like a dog.

“It’s probably best not to bring these things up unless Eddie does first,” Stan said. “I know it hurts. But… he’s married, Richie, and you have to respect that. And I’m sorry. About all of it. Things would have been different if we had never forgotten, but we did. And now we have to figure out how to be in each other’s lives.”

Richie ended up not talking to Eddie for a few days after that and it was fine. The mania and initial hurt was beginning to dissipate with every passing day. Years of emotional dysregulation coming and going with comforting consistency had taught Richie that anytime he found himself thinking he would never get over something, he always did, and then he would think back on it and find it silly he was ever that upset in the first place.

He and Beverly were texting daily and she was having a good time with Bill and Audra, which was a pleasant surprise. She sent Richie endless selfies of herself and Audra at various Los Angeles tourist traps and he wondered if he had done Beverly a disservice by not taking her to things like that when she was staying with him. Considering she spent a significant amount of her time at Richie’s house crying and screaming into a pillow, she likely wasn’t too upset about it. She tried to include Richie in their plans, he made it out to one dinner with them in Santa Monica and mostly just wanted to go home, but he was happy to see Beverly in such good spirits. 

Richie began writing diligently and doing enough stupid interviews and sensitive podcast guest spots to keep Steve happy while they worked on securing some bigger gigs. There was talk about a Netflix special, possibly some HBO docuseries and a guest role on a new sitcom about a hopeful has-been actress living in Van Nuys which was supposed to be funny and subversive because it wasn’t about the glamorous side of California. Audra had connections and was excited to be involved with Bill’s friends’ lives, so she and Richie were getting along, chatting over text occasionally. It was nice, because Richie had just enough of an understanding with Audra that he was a train wreck of a person, but she didn’t have to bear the burden of knowing what an idiot maniac kid he had been.

Then one night, Eddie called him.

It was midnight in New York. Richie was debating whether or not to get high and watching _Real Housewives of Beverly Hills_ when Eddie’s name popped up on his phone. He let it ring just enough times to make it seem casual.

“Hey, so,” Eddie said. “I’m about to have a few days off of work. Do you have room for me in your big fancy Hollywood house?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Richie nearly yelled. “I do have to warn you, though, I’m kind of Hollywood broke. I’m not really livin’ it up in the 90210 or anything. I don’t want you to be disappointed in what an abject failure I am.”

“Is that right? In that case I’m embarrassed to even know you,” Eddie said.

“Yeah, I understand if you don’t want to be seen in public with me or anything.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie laughed. “Don’t make me say something sincere, like, how I’m _proud_ of you or something. That would just kill me.”

“I would literally throw up. Projectile. Everywhere. If you said that to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember how allergic you are to genuine affection. How does this Friday sound for me to fly in?”

“Uh, yeah, good,” Richie said dumbly.

“Until Wednesday?”

“Wednesday, yeah,” Richie said.

“And you can pick me up from LAX?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

There was a faint voice in the background, a distant cry of _Eddie-bear_? that sounded so familiar Richie felt like it was 1989. “Alright, I’m going to bed, but I’ll forward my itinerary to you, okay? Goodnight, Richie.”

“Night, Eddie,” Richie said, and then he ended the call, and then he proceeded to get high.

Bill insisted on joining Richie in picking up Eddie from the airport, which was fine with Richie, because an emotional buffer seemed like a really good idea at the present moment. Beverly and Audra were busy going to the opening of some bar where they served subtly flavored water drops with flowers inside and Bill was thankful for the opportunity to get out of hopping around pretentious Los Angeles hotspots for the day.

“No, but really, I’m glad they’re getting along. I’m so relieved. I’m starting to think they’re in love,” Bill said. “I’m starting to think my wife… is going to leave me for Beverly.”

Eddie’s flight was set to land in just a few minutes and they were waiting for him at baggage claim. He had vowed that if they embarrassed him with a stupid sign that he would turn around and go right back home and with the amount of teens who seemed to be recognizing Richie on their way out of the airport, he was glad they decided not to draw any additional attention to themselves.

“Bill, I have to say something,” Richie said. 

“What? Is it mean?”

“Well, maybe. I just think that… Beverly and Audra look really similar, dude. Really, really similar. Like… sisters,” Richie said, sympathetically patting Bill’s shoulder.

Bill stared at him, mouth hanging open in shock.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, Bill.”

“Fuck you. Okay, fine, now I get to say something. I knew if I didn’t force myself into your plans that you were going to hog Eddie the whole time he’s here just like you did when we were kids.”

“Is that so? Are you sure you aren’t lashing out at me because you’re still mad about—”

“Don’t you fucking bring up the Jennifer Delaney incident, so help me—”

“You’re _still_ mad about that! I fucking knew it, I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you in Derry that you were still fucking mad about that. And you know what? She looked like Beverly, too.”

Jennifer Delaney was a pretty girl with whom Bill was completely smitten their junior year of high school. She said she would only go on a date with Bill if he managed to get her best friend a date with Eddie, and so it was agreed that the four of them would go on a double date together. Eddie ended up bailing last minute, opting instead to go to Richie’s house and sit on his bed in moody silence for the entire evening, and Bill decided that this must have somehow been Richie’s fault.

“She did not! And you _convinced_ Eddie to ditch us at the movies! She _never_ spoke to me again!”

“I did not convince Eddie to do anything! I have no idea where you got that from—you just made that up in your twisted little head.”

“Okay, fine, you know what? We’ll just ask Eddie,” Bill said, gesturing behind Richie.

Richie spun around. There was Eddie, but not the docile, lobotomized Eddie from their last day in Derry. This was normal, displeased, aggravated Eddie, rolling his suitcase behind him, canvas duffle bag slung over his left shoulder. He was wearing his sling on his right arm and a sweater that was probably more suited for the weather in New York City. Richie wanted to cry at the sight of him, very much present, very much alive, very much the way Richie wanted him to be.

Effectively braindead, all Richie could manage to say was, “Sling.”

“My doctor said I took it off too early,” Eddie said. “A child sneezed directly in my face on the plane. Someone coughed on their hand and then opened the overhead bin where I put my bag. Get me out of this airport right now.”

Richie and Bill, still keyed up and trapped in a whirlwind of adolescent anger over their argument about Jennifer Delaney, fought over who would get to carry Eddie’s suitcase. Bill won in the end, but Eddie graciously shoved his duffle bag against Richie’s chest with his good arm.

“Since you’re so desperate,” he said.

Richie wanted to say that Eddie didn’t even know the half of it, but he didn’t, just happily walked alongside him.

They asked Eddie about his flights, and his arm, and his wife. His flights were fine, he had a layover in Phoenix, which he very emphatically stated was his least favorite airport in the country, because it looked like it hadn’t been upgraded since the eighties. His arm was okay, but his doctor was concerned he didn’t give it enough time to heal in the sling and asked that he wear it a while longer, to take some strain off it.

“My wife thinks I’m insane,” he said with a nervous laugh. “She literally thinks I’ve lost my fucking mind, but she’s okay, other than that.”

“Huh,” Richie said, setting Eddie’s duffle bag in the open trunk of Bill’s car. “This is news to her? She didn’t notice, well—” He gestured broadly in Eddie’s direction. “—when you proposed?” Eddie flipped him off. 

“Jesus Christ,” Bill grunted, lifting Eddie’s suitcase up and heaving it into the trunk. He reached up and slammed the door shut. “You packed for how long?”

“I packed _exactly_ enough for _exactly_ how long I’ll be here,” Eddie said humorlessly.

The three of them loaded into the car, Richie opting to sit in the backseat since Eddie was their guest and deserved the comfort of the passenger seat. Since it was a Friday, the traffic leaving the airport was pretty dense, and there was a lot of stopping and starting.

“Hey, Eddie,” Bill said. “Remember Jennifer Delaney?”

“I remember Jennifer Delaney’s weird friend Christina Baxter,” Eddie said.

“Weird? She was totally cute! And she was into you! For, like, the entirety of high school! And you _ditched_ me on our double date at the movies!”

“Are you still mad about that?!” Eddie asked incredulously.

“That’s what I’m saying!” Richie yelled.

“Bill, it’s been almost three decades.”

“Yeah, but it isn’t like I was able to talk to you about it at any point during those three decades! I deserve answers,” Bill said, slamming his hands down on the steering wheel while Eddie twisted around in his seat and gave Richie a _look_. “Why did you ditch me that night to hang out with Richie?”

“I didn’t—fuck, Bill, I didn’t _ditch_ you,” Eddie said, turning back towards Bill. “It was complicated! I flew across the country to see you and this is what you’re worried about? You’re worried about a date you had with Jennifer Delaney when you were seventeen?!”

“Oh don’t even start with me,” Bill said. “You flew across the country to see Richie. I just accidentally became privy to the information. I swear—you two. Some things never change.”

The three of them met up with Beverly and Audra at trendy milk tea joint in Koreatown, one of many but this one was apparently Audra’s new favorite. Beverly hugged Eddie tight even over his fractured arm and Audra greeted him with a very refined kiss on the cheek like the ladies on _Real Housewives_. They went over the same questions about his flights and his arm, talked about traffic, and looked at pictures from the water drop bar on Audra’s Instagram.

“It just tasted like water, though,” Beverly said.

“I mean,” Bill said.

“Well, you think when someone opens up a water drop bar that there’s going to be something special about the water. You order from a menu and they’re all supposed to have different flavors. But it just tasted like _water_ ,” Beverly said.

“That’s L.A. culture at its finest, though, Bev—you go somewhere because people tell you it’s a thing, but then it’s just whatever,” Richie said. “I always go to this place where they put honey on your ice cream. I could just put honey on my own ice cream, but I need to _go_ to _the_ honey ice cream place.”

“I love the honey ice cream place,” Audra sighed. She took a sip of her milk tea and chewed on a boba pearl. “The boba’s a little old today,” she said, grimacing.

“Tell me what the consistency of boba is supposed to be,” Eddie said, holding a small matcha milk tea in both hands like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. Audra had insisted that he leave his comfort zone to try something new and after listening very attentively to his list of allergies and sensitivities, she deduced that a small matcha tea with soy milk wouldn’t cause him any grievous harm.

“Like, chewy,” Beverly said.

“I bit straight through one and it was gritty,” Eddie said, displeased.

“See, that’s wrong. It’s supposed to be chewy. Sticky. If you held one between your fingers, it would be all sticky, like.” Beverly made a strange gesture with her finger and thumb.

“When they get old, they dry out and get gritty. We came at a bad time,” Audra said. “We can come again this weekend when we—oh! Richie, Eddie, did Beverly tell you? We’ve made plans for everyone.”

“Beverly has told me absolutely nothing beyond the most lascivious details of your love affair,” Richie said.

Audra put on a coy smile and covered her face demurely. “We’re going to _noraebang_ , we decided.”

Bill groaned. Beverly clapped her hands together excitedly. Richie was mostly ambivalent, waiting to see if Eddie was going to willingly let Beverly and Audra drag him into a sticky, cramped room so they could get drunk and sing badly to whatever disastrous combination of songs all of their respective tastes would create.

“It’s Korean style karaoke,” Audra continued, talking mostly to Eddie. The expression on his face was unreadable. “It’s private, you rent a room for however many hours you want. You can order drinks and food. It’s fun, even if Bill thinks it isn’t.”

“It isn’t that I don’t think it’s fun,” Bill argued, “you just never let me choose any songs! You always want to do early 2000s pop music! You never let me do any eighties!”

“That is a _lie_ ,” Audra said, scandalized. “We’ll do lots of eighties and we’ll all be very happy. Does that sound okay with everyone?”

They all turned to look at Eddie expectantly, their fate resting solely on his shoulders.

“Uh, sure,” he said, and Beverly grabbed him by the face and kissed him on the cheek, right over his scar.

By the time Bill dropped Richie and Eddie off at Richie’s place, the sun was setting. Richie was hauling Eddie’s suitcase up the driveway when he noticed that Eddie was stopped and staring up at the sky, pink and purple and orange, decorated with uniform rows of palm trees scaling the horizon. It had been quite some time since Richie had stopped to consider the beauty of a California sunset. He was so used to seeing them that he barely even noticed when they were particularly stunning like this one.

“It’s pretty,” Eddie said simply, securing the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder, and he followed Richie into the house.

All in all, Richie wasn’t too concerned about his house living up to Eddie’s no doubt meticulously high standards of cleanliness. He wasn’t as slovenly as his comedy would suggest. However, there was an embarrassing amount of empty beer bottles lining the kitchen counters that he had meant to take out to recycling, which Eddie most certainly noticed immediately.

The front of the house had an open floor plan, the foyer leading straight into the kitchen, which dipped off with two shallow steps into the living room. The floor-to-ceiling windows around the living room kept everything well-lit and it was overall a nice, comfortable home by anyone’s standards and a little modest by Hollywood standards. Ten years prior, Richie would have had lines of coke on the living room table. Now he had a cute row of succulents. Growth.

“Your house looks like an Ikea display room,” Eddie said.

“I feel like that might have something to do with the fact that my polyamorous lesbian throuple friends helped me move in when I bought the place and I let them pretty much do whatever they wanted. I had no salvageable furniture from my old place, and I told them to go fuckin’ hogwild with it,” Richie explained, feeling like his heart was going to explode with joy watching Eddie dole out such heavy scrutiny towards his entire lifestyle. It felt right, and necessary, and perfect.

“A polyamorous lesbian throuple,” Eddie repeated, circling around the kitchen and inspecting every surface closely.

“Yeah, and their tastes combined equal something that kind of looks like an Ikea display room. I should introduce you to them. There’s a stone butch, high femme, and then this kind of Taylor Swift type lesbian with no convenient label,” Richie said, watching Eddie open the refrigerator—mostly full of beer and condiments—and then close it, turning to Richie and giving him a disapproving frown. 

“Taylor Swift is not a lesbian,” he said. “You have no food, Richie, how do you feed yourself?”

“I’m just taking it a day at a time, Eds. And Taylor Swift is totally a lesbian,” Richie said, but Eddie was not entirely convinced.

They moved on to the guest room, which still had some remnants of Beverly’s lingering presence. Hair clips and a pair of headphones sat on the bedside table, a wrinkled cardigan hanging off of the chest of drawers. Eddie observed these things fondly. He and Beverly had always had a very special and very private friendship when they were kids. Beverly took exceptional care to keep whatever business she had with Eddie to herself. Quiet conversations apart from the others and movie dates, just the two of them. Beverly made it no secret that she loathed the idea of being expected to care for anyone like some kind of surrogate mother or big sister, but Eddie was probably her exception to the rule. 

“I just felt like he needed a little extra attention, even if he didn’t want to ask for it,” Beverly had said during her stay with Richie. “We talked about a lot of crazy shit. I wonder if he remembers yet.”

Richie wheeled in Eddie’s suitcase and then dropped his duffel bag on the bed. Eddie was distracted, tangling his fingers through Beverly’s headphones absentmindedly and staring off into space. Thinking of her, probably, remembering some hazy memory that he didn’t feel like sharing with Richie.

“Do you want to sleep off your jetlag?” Richie asked, and Eddie looked at him, seemingly shocked at the sound of another voice. “Oh, do you also go into, like… a total fugue state when you start remembering weird Derry shit?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said, and he laughed uncomfortably. “It was… a strange memory. Probably would have been better to keep that one repressed.” He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair.

“You should sleep,” Richie said.

“Yeah, yeah, definitely… Hey, Richie,” Eddie said plaintively. “Thanks for everything.”

Richie wasn’t sure what he meant, but he said, “You’re welcome, Eds. Anytime”

Then Eddie decided to do the worst possible thing he could have done in that moment. He pulled the strap of the sling off of his neck to allow himself the freedom to take his sweater off, revealing a threadbare undershirt and a glimpse of the skin between the rustled hem of the shirt and his pants. Richie felt like a repressed Victorian maiden dying from the shock of seeing an exposed ankle. He was completely and totally fucked. 

Richie was in the middle of his nightly routine of watching _Real Housewives_ and debating if he should get high when Eddie emerged from the guest room, showered, still looking very tired but seeming to be in slightly better spirits. He settled on the edge of the couch with the chaise seating and pulled his legs close to his chest, wrapping his arms around his knees the way he did when he was a kid. Richie wondered if he had maintained this mannerism over the years or if it was coming out only since they were together.

“I like the New York City one,” he said, referring to the show.

“That one’s okay. I think California rich people are funnier. They’re stupider than New York City rich people. I can’t tell you why,” Richie said. He opened the small drawer on the underside of the coffee table and stashed away his contraband. Eddie either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“Does that apply to you?” he asked.

“What, that I’m stupider than—well, yeah, of course it applies to me. All the grey matter in my head dried up like ten years ago. I don’t even think about anything. I think Audra knows Camille Grammer. We should all go to brunch while you’re here.”

“Isn’t she a registered Republican?”

“Why… do you know so much about the political leanings of the housewives?” Richie asked, because he knew it would annoy Eddie.

“Wh—I only know that one!” Eddie said, throwing his good arm up angrily.

On the television, one of the housewives broke a wine glass and threatened another for implying something unsavory about her husband. It was the climax of a long narrative between these two particular housewives who had long hated each other since the beginning of the season because of some accusations of an alcoholic relapse.

“She literally was going for the throat!” Eddie said, with the same intensity as someone watching a contact sport. “Did you see that?”

Richie grabbed the controller to rewind the episode by a few seconds, replaying the scene. The enraged housewife did indeed reach across the table to grab the other woman by the throat, pulling her hand back at the last second. “Holy shit! You know, Beverly did the exact same thing to me over dinner when she was here. I was like, you know, I don’t know if the Cranberries have aged very well compared to other nineties ensembles and she just kind of lost it.”

“Oh my God,” Eddie said, eyes lighting up, the association of Beverly and her favorite band in high school surely bringing back a pleasant round of memories. “Remember when _Linger_ came out?”

“Fuck, of course I do. She would just lie in the hammock with her Walkman—her fucking Walkman, holy shit, it was 1993 when that album came out. That was whenever her and Bill were on the outs.”

Beverly had never truly stopped carrying a torch for Bill all through high school and _Linger_ by the Cranberries became her melancholy anthem of longing and unrequited love. Over the years, whenever Richie heard the song playing at the grocery store or in a movie, his stomach would literally ache with sadness, which always seemed weird to him because it wasn’t a particular favorite of his. With his renewed knowledge of Beverly, it made a lot more sense.

“Did they ever officially date in high school? I honestly can’t remember,” Eddie said. 

“Yeah, they did the off and on thing for a while, but it never worked out. It makes literally no sense, looking back on it. Having to listen to them bitch and moan about each other, but they couldn’t make a relationship work for more than two months at a time?” Richie was aware that this was a very _pot_ , _kettle_ stance to take, considering his perpetual adolescent despair over Eddie being so hot and cold.

“Right! And then they’d break up and try to take the rest of us with them in the divorce, which would last all of, what? A week? Before we were all hanging out again.”

“You always went with Bill,” Richie said, and he kind of wish he hadn’t said it, but he did. 

“I always felt like he needed me to,” Eddie said. There was no real weight to it. He didn’t seem particularly defensive or like he felt the need to explain himself. “Why did you always go with Beverly?”

It was fair of him to wonder. Richie was always unquestionably loyal to Beverly in nearly every situation they faced as a group, sometimes even to the point that Beverly would get angry, because she felt like she didn’t deserve it. She didn’t want to accept unwavering love because she didn’t think she had earned it. She said as much then, but Richie didn’t really understand it, probably because he made a habit of taking anything that he could get from anyone and never stopped to think if he deserved it or not—whatever that meant.

“I guess because I felt like she needed me to,” Richie said, and Eddie gave him a sympathetic smile.

They watched TV and talked like that for a while longer, but Eddie was sleepy again soon enough, still exhausted from the stress of flying and the change in time zones. Back in Derry, he had been wound so tight, so angry, and on the verge of constant hysterics, it was initially difficult for Richie to imagine him as anything but that distressed, anxious vision when they were texting or talking on the phone. But here he was, nodding off on the couch in Richie’s house, lured to sleep by conversation about the soft, beautiful corners of their childhood. He looked comfortable and perfectly placed.

Richie didn’t have the heart to have him move to the guest room once he dozed off. He grabbed the throw blanket that was kept folded and hanging off the back of the couch and draped it over where Eddie was curled up in the corner of the chaise. He turned off the TV, dimmed the lights, and went to his bedroom, turning back only once to take in the quiet comfort of seeing Eddie in his home, that made him both happy and sad at the same time.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is called “I Love L.A. And Haven’t Been There Since February Because Of The Pandemic So I Wanted To Write Everyone Having A Really Nice, Normal Day In L.A.” 
> 
> content warning: references to drug use, alcohol, disordered eating, three passing references to real life murder cases, referenced sonia kaspbrak abuse, self-referential/tongue in cheek use of the f-slur by richie.

Richie was aware that he was dreaming this time around.

It used to be that he would have this dream every few weeks and it always followed the same script. He was thirteen years old. Sitting in his childhood bedroom in an unfamiliar town, he would take stock of the posters on the wall, his comic book collection, the clothes strewn on the floor and understand that they were his. He would go downstairs and find his parents in the kitchen, slow dancing to no music. He would go outside, and a boy would be waiting for him, nothing more than a silhouette of someone he loved once. Nameless, faceless, as incomprehensible as TV static or a radio station cutting out in a tunnel. This boy would take his hand and they would walk together until the earth took the form of the clear water of the quarry, though Richie did not recognize this place as the quarry before.

The boy was Eddie. Their friends were waiting for them along the edge of the water. And together they cupped their palms and drank from the quarry like communion wine. This time, he saw their faces and he knew their names. He could see his reflection in the blue-green water and then they were eighteen.

It was the day he left Derry. His parents were packing up the car for their drive to Chicago. He remembered that now to be the day his love for Eddie and his fear of losing him cycled rapidly in endless occultation, the pain and imminent emptiness, the way Eddie held his hand but said nothing. 

This time, Eddie asked him, _Do you want to see what would have happened if you hadn’t pulled me out of the way in time_? _It looks much worse in the daylight._

Richie shook his head, but that didn’t stop the slow formation of a hole in Eddie’s chest, the sickening sound of cracking ribs and Eddie’s guts spilling at their feet. All while Eddie looked at him with nothing more than a plaintive frown. His eyes were soft and warm. He was bleeding out. He was dying.

This time, Eddie asked him, _Do you feel like I owe you something? Is that what all this is about?_

Richie was aware that he was dreaming, but it didn’t make it hurt any less. _Not gonna sit here and argue with some spiteful dream version of you when I could just go argue with the spiteful real version of you, Eds_ , he said.

He woke up before dream-Eddie could hurt his feelings anymore. Someone was banging on the front door and he had a pretty good idea of who it was, considering that Beverly had mentioned she might try to come over when they had all parted ways at the milk tea shop. Before leaving his room, he stopped and looked at himself in the mirror. Not eighteen, not in Derry, not reliving the worst heartbreak of his life. He never thought he would ever feel so thankful to be forty years old.

In the living room, Eddie was stirring awake on the couch. “Holy fuck,” he groaned. He sat up and stretched, left arm rising over his head and right arm staying down uncomfortably at his side. He looked disheveled and painfully adorable. “You let me sleep out here? Who is at the fucking door?”

“Beverly,” Richie said, taking his sweet time to let her in, just to annoy her. 

“Seriously? She’s gonna see me looking like—”

“What, like a normal person and not a J. Crew mannequin? She’s seen you covered in sewer sludge and bleeding from your face, I think she can deal with seeing you like this,” Richie said, and Eddie pulled his blanket tightly around himself like a cocoon.

Richie opened the door. Beverly was grinning widely and holding two plastic bags in her hands. “Good morning,” she said, and extended her arms. She was wearing a loose floral dress over a pair of black stockings, very reminiscent of how she dressed in high school. Her boots were the kind that looked worn on purpose, to be fashionable, which seemed like the perfect intersection of Beverly’s younger and present self.

“Alcohol,” Richie said, taking the bags from her.

“ _Food_ , because I know you don’t have any. Eddie texted me yesterday and told me you’re living in squalor since I left you alone. These are _groceries_ ,” she said, sounding out the word _gro-cer-ies_ very slowly.

“Wow, Bev, this is uncomfortably nice of you,” Richie said, and gestured her inside. “And you’re awake before noon! Will wonders never cease?”

“Fuck you,” Beverly said.

“Hey, look, I have to tell you something. Eddie’s upset you’re going to see him without his human skin.” Richie took the bags to the kitchen island and inspected the contents. A carton of eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables, and some nasty looking protein bars among other incidentals. Three bottles of kombucha. Beverly was turning full granola right before their eyes.

“Eddie’s upset that I’m going to learn he’s actually ten rats in a trench coat?” Beverly beelined over to the couch and sat down at the end of the chaise with her legs crossed. She pulled Eddie into a hug, this time being more careful of his fractured arm. “I’m really glad you came to visit. I miss you the second we’re apart.”

“What about me?” Richie asked.

“I see you all the time,” Beverly said.

“Yeah, because I graciously let you live at my fucking house for three weeks!”

“Hush, you never wanted me to leave,” Beverly said, still hugging Eddie. She told Richie once that a hug needed to last for at least twenty seconds to release oxytocin and then insisted that she and Richie hug every morning upon waking for a full minute, no speaking allowed, _to farm for an ounce of organic joy_. That was probably the goal here. 

“I miss you too, Beverly,” Eddie said, his voice muffled against Beverly’s shoulder. “But you have to let me go, Bev, I’m gross,” he whined at her, and she hugged him tighter. He rested his head on her shoulder. “How long are you staying out here, anyway?”

“Forever, probably,” she said, releasing her hold on him. “I don’t know. I wish I never had to go back. I like what I’m doing right now. I love California. I have no idea why I wasted so much of my life on the east coast.”

Richie placed the eggs, produce, and kombucha in the refrigerator, admiring how it now gave the impression of belonging to a functional adult who cared about gastrointestinal health and not a depressed college student. “I told you, you can stay with me and be my kitchen wench.”

“I can’t cook,” Beverly said, frowning.

“You’re a forty-year-old woman,” Eddie said.

“Oh, so because I’m a woman, I have to know how to cook? Did you miss the women’s lib movement, Eddie?” Beverly asked. “Second wave feminism? Did you miss all that?” Eddie stared at her.

“What, can _you_ cook, Eddie?” Richie said. 

“I can cook enough to function!” Eddie said defensively. “Myra always wants to cook for me, but it’s easier if I cook for myself because I log all of my calories—”

“Eddie!” Beverly and Richie groaned in unison.

“ _Bo-ring_ ,” Beverly said.

“It’s the _only_ thing standing between me and a colossal meltdown.” 

“Oh, so it’s about _control_ ,” Beverly said in the voice of someone who had spent a lot of time in therapy.

Richie joined the two of them on the couch and watched Eddie explain his calorie counting app to Beverly, squinting to see the tiny numbers on the perfect little multicolored pie chart of yesterday’s macros. There were 1,635 calories logged for the entire day, including the milk tea Audra had ordered for him. Beverly commented that 1,600 seemed a bit low and Eddie’s excuse was that flying made him nauseated and he had a hard time keeping food down.

“I just want you to be healthy,” Beverly said, because she didn’t care about tact. She grabbed Eddie’s face in her hands and held his gaze with terrifying intensity. “I just want to see you eating, in the purple rain.”

That got the three of them laughing and effectively changed the subject to the fact that they all needed to eat breakfast. Beverly decided to call Eddie’s bluff and tasked him with cooking for everyone which resulted in three omelets that mostly just looked like scrambled eggs because he wasn’t good at flipping omelets. Richie told him that if he had just introduced them as scrambled eggs then they would have been impressive, but with the knowledge that they were meant to be omelets, they were sad and pathetic. Eddie told him to go fuck himself and the three of them ate together on the living room floor, watching the pilot episode of a show about two shitty people who meet and fall in love in Los Angeles and are very upfront about how shitty they are at the beginning of the relationship.

“That’s me and Richie falling in love,” Beverly said. Richie pulled her into a headlock and messed up her hair while Eddie laughed, sounding just like he did when they were thirteen and Richie did something completely obnoxious to get his attention. It felt like 1989, just for a minute. 

Later on, Beverly decided she wanted to take an afternoon nap, easily making herself at home once more and taking refuge in the guest room. This left Richie and Eddie to figure out how they wanted to fill the afternoon until they were ready to meet up with Bill and Audra later that evening.

“We can go to the Santa Monica Pier so you have an L.A. tourist experience and since Beverly has requested In-N-Out for lunch, we can stop there on the way back. Will your body, like, collapse on a cellular level if you have a burger? None of that replacing the bun with lettuce shit, either,” Richie said. Eddie looked unsure, impressively unaffected by the cultural pressure to try In-N-Out when visiting California for the first time. But Richie remembered that there was one surefire way to make Eddie want to do of something of his own free will, and it was to doubt his ability to do it at all. “On second thought, I don’t think your fragile gym rat body could stand a big, greasy burger. You’d probably fall apart. Maybe even die.”

“I can eat a burger,” Eddie said, immediately falling for it. “I can absolutely eat a burger! Don’t patronize me.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll believe it when I see it,” Richie said, to seal the deal. They settled on these plans, both agreeing that Eddie needed to experience something quintessentially touristy even if it most certainly promised disastrous results, since Eddie was already cursed with the brain of a seasoned New Yorker that left him magnetically repelled from tourist traps on principle, even when he was a tourist himself.

Richie patted down his pockets to make sure he had his phone and grabbed his car keys from the kitchen island. It was Saturday, which meant that traffic and the pier were going to be an absolute nightmare, but it was difficult to care when the frontal lobe of Richie’s brain was overheating like a shitty old computer with the knowledge that he was going to spend the day with Eddie doing extremely mundane, almost boring things like walking up and down a pier and stopping for fast food on the way home. Richie probably couldn’t be more keyed up if he snorted a line of coke directly off the floor.

Once they were outside, Eddie offered to drive, with this insane glint in his eye that told Richie he actually wanted to experience the height of L.A. traffic, on purpose, which was as terrifying to Richie as it was hazardously and confusingly attractive. “Eddie,” he said, “with all due respect, I value our lives. Didn’t you wreck your car when Mike called you?”

“Oh, what, you’re too good to ride in a car with me because I wrecked one time?” Eddie asked. He paused. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I just remembered something.”

“God,” Richie groaned, smashing the button on his keys that unlocked the car over and over again, hoping that the incessant beeping from the car would distract Eddie from what Richie was certain he was about to say. “Yeah, I think I know exactly what you’re talking about.” 

“After homecoming. Your dad’s car.” Those two details were enough for them to know that they were on the same page. 

“God _dammit_. I hate this. You shouldn’t be able to remember things that didn’t happen to you. You shouldn’t have access to the archive of the worst moments of my life, that isn’t even fair.” It was actually one of the last things Richie had talked to his father about before his untimely passing several years prior and only because Wentworth had mentioned it first. It had been completely removed from the context of Derry, like something that happened to Richie in a voidspace separate from the rest of his life. (The conversation went something like, “Son, remember when you crashed my car and broke your nose?” “Not really.” “Well, it definitely happened.”)

Eddie was considerately silent as he climbed in the car, adjusted the seat to his liking, and buckled his seatbelt. Maybe he was going to let Richie have this one thing, this single memory he could keep tucked away and given no power over him. “Well,” he said finally, speaking calmly and carefully, “I can’t make myself forget visiting you in the hospital. Sorry. That was probably the most terrified I’d ever felt in my life up until that point, clown shit included.”

It was homecoming of their junior year. They had decided to tailgate with some other kids from school after the festivities. Richie, to his credit, had refrained from having anything to drink with the others after an earlier incident where he’d hit a neighbor’s mailbox while tipsy. The universe has a funny way of maintaining status quo, it seemed, and he ended up hydroplaning and hitting a utility pole on the way home.

He had a concussion in addition to the broken nose, and they kept him in the hospital for two days before they surmised that the reason why he kept throwing up every few hours was from anxiety and not from any prolonged concussion symptoms. Since this was Derry Hospital, there was a lot to be said for the quality of care he was receiving, none of it good.

The night he was admitted, he asked—repeatedly and deliriously, a nurse told him when it was time for him go home—for them to call Eddie Kaspbrak. _You’ve gotta call Eddie Kaspbrak and let him know I’m here, he’ll be so pissed at me if you don’t. You have to tell my mom to call Eddie first thing tomorrow morning. That’s Eddie. Kaspbrak. E-D-D-I-E-K-A-S-P-B-R-A-K._

“Jesus, yeah,” Richie sighed. It wasn’t fair of Richie to deprive Eddie of his justifiable sadness over this. They had been so young and so unacquainted with the regular horrors of the world, after experiencing their worst nightmares come to life at thirteen. Suddenly it seemed an interdimensional clown demon was nothing compared to wet pavement and a utility pole. It wasn’t fair for Richie to want Eddie to just shut up about it. He said, “God, I was an idiot, Eds.”

“You were,” Eddie said, with the slightest hint of fondness in his voice, probably a betrayal against the depth of the pain he was feeling. “But not that time. It wasn’t your fault.”

Richie adjusted the rearview mirror and took unnecessary care in backing down the familiar slope of the driveway, stalling for just a moment to buy himself time to decide what he wanted to say next. There was one thing he remembered with crystal clarity. “You were mad at me.”

“I was mad because the idea of losing you to something like that after we survived the fucking clown made me feel literally _insane_. I wasn’t mad _at_ you, Richie. I should have told you that. I was scared.”

“But I was okay,” Richie said, like Eddie was still in need of assurance over it. Like there was lingering doubt Richie had survived the accident unscathed and Eddie needed the solid proof of it all over again. All those years ago, he had anxiously crept through the door of the hospital room and gasped when he saw Richie’s swollen eyes and the splint on his broken nose, expecting worse, sobbing with relief when he realized Richie was more or less fine, just a little banged up. “It wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be. I was okay.”

“You were okay,” Eddie said.

“I’m sorry,” Richie said, and he felt very ashamed. Worse than his usual habit of self-loathing and catastrophizing his impact on the lives of others. Was it just because it was Eddie? Would he feel the same way if it were anyone else? What did he want Eddie to say, really? _I resented you for making me feel that way at all_ , probably, or something similar. Falling back into that old habit of wanting the worst of Eddie because he feared he couldn’t hold on to the best of him.

Eddie visited Richie in the hospital that day because they were best friends and he cried the way he did because he really, really, really fucking loved Richie. And Richie knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt because Eddie had said to him, _I really, really, really fucking love you, Richie_. He’d said it, sobbing, up against Richie’s chest.

“What are you sorry for?” Eddie asked. His gaze was focused and sincere, painfully considerate, like he lived only to perceive and understand what Richie was feeling. Richie kept glancing away from road just to steal a look at him. He wanted to live in this moment forever, wanted to bottle it up and carry it with him everywhere, wanted to freeze the both of them up in a crystal stasis forever. Eddie was looking at him, and Eddie was thinking about him, and Eddie was worried about him. 

Richie said, “I was always causing you trouble.”

“Oh,” Eddie said simply, pulling his gaze from Richie and looking straight ahead. “It’s fine, Richie. I wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t want to be. For all of it.”

All of it. And there had been a lot. It was impossible to know how long the seven of them were going to spend digging up and reprocessing old, shameful memories. Agitating secret wounds better left untouched. Pain that would have been organically lost with time if they had been given the privilege of growing up like normal people, now fresh and raw, like it was being projected onto a movie screen they couldn’t look away from. Pain that demanded to be felt with the same intensity of their youth.

“I caused you a lot of trouble, too,” Eddie continued. “It wasn’t all—look, I know that when we’re all reminiscing on dumb shit we did as kids, you’re at the center of a lot of it, but it wasn’t always you. And I don’t want you to think that. I don’t… want you to feel bad. About any of it.”

“I think I kind of deserve to feel bad about some of it,” Richie said. They turned onto Santa Monica Boulevard, then it was a straight shot to the city proper. Traffic was just about as bad as Richie had anticipated, typical for this area on a lovely Saturday afternoon such as this, but the strange serenity of their conversation made him feel like they were the only two people left in the world. It all felt very big and full of loss, kind of in the same way a post-apocalyptic thriller will feel when the main character wakes up and walks through a metropolitan wasteland, abandoned cars on the freeway, terrifying but peaceful in a grayscale kind of way. 

“It’s not gonna do any of us any good if you’re just moping and feeling sorry for yourself,” Eddie said, his tone softer than his choice of words. “I mean it, Rich, I don’t want you to waste your time feeling bad about any of that. I think you paid your dues when we were kids.” 

Richie wished that he could psychically communicate with Eddie all the things he really wanted them to talk about. The things he had promised himself he wouldn’t speak on unless Eddie brought them up first. It was difficult to have this conversation without being able to talk about the memories that still ached like fresh bruises. He wished he could find the nearest courthouse and marry Eddie without a second thought. He wished he could keep driving until they were somewhere untied to the sad truth of who they were. He wished they were eighteen. He wished they could both be reborn and find each other again in their next life. Quietly, he said, “I hurt you,” and tried not to sound too torn up over it. “A lot.” 

“Yeah, well,” Eddie said, just as quiet. He sank down in his seat and folded his left arm over his right, fiddling nervously with the strap of the sling. “I hurt you, too.”

“Eddie, _really_ , it’s—”

“No. Don’t say it’s okay. It was never okay.”

“Fine,” Richie conceded, thought it seemed funny to him that he was apparently not allowed to feel any remorse over the ways he had hurt Eddie, while Eddie was allowed to feel endless remorse over the ways he had hurt Richie. “It wasn’t okay. You hurt me sometimes, and it wasn’t okay.”

Eddie nodded. He seemed to visibly relax at Richie’s admission. Like the simple act of being held accountable was a spiritual revelation for him. Richie spitefully wondered if Eddie had ever been held accountable for anything in his entire life prior to this conversation and underneath that, he knew he wasn’t being fair. Eddie hadn’t been some heartless monster wreaking havoc on Richie’s delicate feelings every moment they spent together. But it was disturbingly easy to cast Eddie as the villain in the narrative of Richie’s tumultuous adolescence, which was crazy considering Richie had spent those same years deeply and madly in love with him, and those two truths existing at once were why Richie constantly felt like he was losing his mind. Maybe they weren’t ready to talk about the specifics—that was fine. Eddie’s willingness to admit the very fact that he hurt Richie at all was like a balm being applied to invisible burns. 

“Hey,” Richie said, stealing one last look at Eddie. He was dangerously close to being rendered too vulnerable at the way Eddie was unable to hide the unadulterated sorrow in his stupidly gigantic eyes. Richie figured he would always be willing to lay down his ego and his pride and his life at Eddie’s feet to avoid seeing him look like that for even a second, but now really wasn’t the time to flay himself alive. Eddie was telling Richie not to crucify himself and Richie still wanted to, even knowing it wouldn’t help, even knowing it would upset Eddie to do so. It was a compulsion. It was a sickness. He reached over to where his phone sat in the center console and then tossed it over into Eddie’s lap. “Let’s listen to music. Grab the aux cord.”

They both silently agreed to allow their conversation to reach its natural conclusion. Eddie sifted through Richie’s chaotic assortment of Spotify playlists and settled on one that opened with an old favorite of Richie’s, a Roy Orbison song his dad had always liked. Richie wanted to ask Eddie why he picked this particular song, but he didn’t. And Roy Orbison sang, _In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you. In dreams you’re mine, all the time. We’re together in dreams, in dreams._

The air smelled like the strange but not unpleasant combination of the different restaurants dotted along the strip—a burger joint on top of seafood on top of carnival food on top of Mexican food—the weather-touched wood of the pier, and the salty, fresh ocean breeze. The expanse of the area from the pier itself down to the beach was crowded with families, couples, college kids talking and laughing, a menagerie of lively, unironic enjoyment of something Richie had decided years ago he was too jaded and authentically L.A. to waste his time on. The hum of conversation and the repetitive sound of the carnival rides in Pacific Park created an almost calming, symphonic blanket of sound. It was nice.

“So,” Richie said, “this is it, really. You walk around, you eat, you ride the Ferris wheel—”

“I’m not riding the Ferris wheel,” Eddie said.

“And then you walk around some more. And you get a funnel cake.”

“I’ll get a funnel cake,” Eddie said.

So they got a funnel cake to share and both picked off of it with their fingers. They watched a family of seven all struggle to fit into an Instagram-worthy selfie in front of the seafood place from _Forrest Gump_. Richie recounted the time he dropped acid under the pier and started crying when he saw the Ferris wheel lit up against the night sky.

“I was dating this girl named Sandy at the time. We were, like, catastrophically fucking horrible for each other,” Richie said. “We’re still in touch, though. She’s normal now, she has a place in Diamond Bar with her wife.”

Sandy had eventually become aware of her status as a beard and wasn’t upset by it. Once after Richie ended one of his many chaotic, short-lived relationships with emotionally unavailable men, she asked him if his entire sexual development had been informed by Anthony Perkins in _Psycho_ because every guy he dated looked the exact same—dark hair, dark eyes, thin and kind of moody. Looking at Eddie now, Richie didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the revelation.

His relationships were always rife with brutal vulnerability on his part, Richie was always too willing to emotionally bleed out just to make someone understand him even a little bit, and then when the honeymoon phase of the push-and-pull, back-and-forth, give-and-take faded, he couldn’t take it. One guy, probably the nicest and most well-adjusted of the bunch, an aspiring actor named Joshua who hated being called Josh, said to Richie towards the end, “I truly hope you figure out whatever the fuck is wrong with you.” Richie kind of wanted to call him up and say, “Hey! Guess what! Ten years later and I kind of figured it out! And no, things haven’t gotten any better! And they probably never will!”

They walked around in aimless circles, considered getting something to eat and decided against it since they were due for lunch at In-n-Out, and the afternoon soon turned from mild to chilly. Eddie lamented that he had left the house without his coat. He was wearing a stuffy collared shirt with a dark blue sweater overtop, which Richie said made him look like a morally bankrupt private school boy, and wasn’t quite enough to combat the chill in the air. Richie was attuned to cold coastal weather. He liked it. It wasn’t bitter like the east coast. Just breezy and salty.

Not thinking too much about it, he took off his worn leather jacket—painstakingly repaired and cared for by Beverly after Derry—and draped it over Eddie’s shoulders. When he realized what he’d done, the _Kill Bill_ siren on top of a choir of foghorns went off in his head and he didn’t know if yanking the jacket off of Eddie would be more or less freakish than the fact he had given it to him in the first place. But before he was forced to decide, Eddie casually, not even really paying too much attention, shrugged his left arm into the sleeve and then reached over and pulled the other side comfortably over his fractured arm.

“I like it here,” he said. He was looking out towards the ocean. 

“Here?” Richie asked dumbly.

“In California,” Eddie said.

“Do you wanna go down to the beach?” Richie asked, because he had no idea what else to say. _Then move to California,_ was his first instinct. And _I love you, in case you forgot,_ was a close second. Fucking stupid.

Eddie looked at Richie and he smiled. He looked so tiny swallowed up in Richie’s jacket. Richie felt like he could sooner grab Eddie and squeeze him down to literal nonexistence before he was able to convey the depth of what he felt just looking at him like this. He felt like he might be having an aortic aneurysm, which was scary because that’s what killed his dad seven years ago. He felt like Santa Monica was his favorite place on earth now and he never wanted to leave.

“Sure,” Eddie said.

They circled back around to the front of the pier and over to one of the beach entrances where a mother was dragging her unruly child up the stairs by the arm. The kid was laughing, unaware of the stress he was causing her, trying to run back down towards the ocean. It made Richie want to call up his own mother and apologize to her for the years 1976 to 1994.

Maggie Tozier had always thought Eddie was a good kid. She said he was well-mannered and polite. He always helped with the dishes when he came over for dinner. He entertained Wentworth’s countless stories about all the fun he had before he settled down to become a family man. Eddie was a fine kid, Richie figured, but he wasn’t the best—as in, he wasn’t the paragon of goodliness and lawfulness like Stan was. He was pretty ruthless and sneaky in his own way.

Once when Maggie caught wind of Richie and Eddie fighting when they were in high school, she said that people like Eddie were hard to deal with, because they were deceitful without meaning to be. She didn’t really explain what she meant. Maybe he would call her, ask her if she remembered. Ask her to elaborate. She would most certainly be surprised to hear the name Eddie Kaspbrak after twenty-three years. He wondered if she had ever suspected anything. Sometimes it seemed like she had. Sometimes she and Eddie had private conversations that Eddie never wanted to talk about with Richie afterwards, so they were definitely talking about Richie. He was going to call her soon.

Their feet sank down into the sand and they walked along the horizon with heavy steps. Richie was starting to feel the cold, but he didn’t want to leave just yet. Just a few more minutes of this would be enough to keep him going for the rest of his life, probably. “Remember,” he said, “we used to talk about getting a car and driving out to San Francisco with Beverly. Rent an apartment in Haight-Ashbury. Live all counterculture.”

“God, I would literally dream about it,” Eddie said. “I wonder what would have happened if we had left together. Would we have remembered?”

“Maybe just the good stuff,” Richie said. “You know, each other. We would have totally made it work. Beverly would have started her company right out of our apartment. I would have done more or the less the same thing I did to get here, which was have no sense of pride and a shitty moral code. And you would have… Well, I don’t know, Eds. You aren’t very counterculture. You never were, even when we were kids.”

“Don’t call me that. Counterculture was dead in the nineties anyway,” Eddie said. “It’s been dead since the Vietnam War ended, it just took that long to reach you and Beverly in Derry.”

“Counterculture is never dead. So you would have been a risk analyst, working for the man in San Francisco with your two weird artsy stoner roommates?”

“What, are those my only two options? Counterculture or risk analyst? Those are the only two paths available to us in life?” Eddie asked. He continued, fired up, “Are you telling me right now that you think you’re an authentic representation of counterculture, Mr. Beverly Hills? Oh, wait, excuse me. Mr. Ten Minutes From Beverly Hills. You live in a hotbed of gentrification and income disparity just like I do and you’re going to talk to me about counterculture.”

“Yowza!” Richie yelled excitedly, clapping his hands. “You’re a real champion of the people, Eds! A real soldier of the working class! And here I thought you were just Patrick Bateman in the flesh!” 

“Fucking idiot,” Eddie said, laughing. He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a tube of medicated lip balm, opened it, and applied it to his lips. “Really, you’re the worst.”

“You remembered to bring that but not your coat,” Richie said.

“Fuck you, I knew I was going to get a windburn around my mouth and I came prepared,” Eddie said. Then he used his thumb to wipe off the excess lip balm from his lips, reached up and ran it over Richie’s lips, and just continued walking like it was nothing. Richie’s brain promptly short-circuited inside his skull in a genuine momentary lapse of consciousness.

Richie was certain he was literally dying and having a prolonged dream straight from the deepest recesses of his fucked up gay brain while his mind and body slowly shut down in hospice care somewhere. Or this was possibly an excruciatingly long deadlights vision and Pennywise was fucking with him in the cruelest way imaginable. Jesus Christ, he needed to sit down.

It was just so _Eddie_ , so true to the way he had always handled Richie when they were kids. So casually tactile and aggressively affectionate. 

But they weren’t kids. They were forty years old, and Eddie was married, and Richie had only a month ago confessed that he had spent nearly the entirety of his life loving Eddie or chasing after the faintest memory of him. And Eddie was wearing Richie’s jacket. And Eddie ran his thumb over Richie’s lips without a second thought. And they were walking together along the beach in Santa Monica and Eddie’s hair was becoming messier and messier from the ocean breeze and it was too easy for Richie to pretend like this was all _his_ , the way he wanted it to be, the way he would dream of for the rest of his life.

Eddie kept walking, so Richie caught up with him, and they talked together about what else they should do while Eddie was in town. Richie touched his fingers to his mouth lightly, to transfer the energy that moved from Eddie’s lips, to Eddie’s thumb, to Richie’s lips, and now to Richie’s fingers, and it was a part of him. As the moment passed, the energy would remain, and Richie would keep it forever.

“So what you’re telling me,” Eddie said, lifting up the top bun of his burger and giving it a judgmental onceover, “is that this regional loyalty to In-n-Out is genuine. From the heart. You guys really like this food.”

“Yeah, it’s alright,” Richie said, already halfway through his burger while Eddie had yet to take the first bite of his. They decided to dine in and order Beverly’s food when they were ready to leave, because In-n-Out was best consumed fresh. Eddie told Richie this was the first time he had sat down to eat in a fast food restaurant in at least eight years, which was very sane and normal of him. “The fries start going stale the second you pick them up from the counter, though.”

“I don’t understand. I can’t understand this. You’re telling me that the food is only good if you have the time and energy to eat it the second it’s prepared. Correct? You’re telling me that if we had ordered our food and driven back to your house and then eaten it, then the quality would have decreased—how much? Give me an estimate here.”

“About sixty percent, maybe,” Richie said, with a noncommittal hand wave. “Depending on traffic.”

“So, In-n-Out is that important to the cultural fabric of California that you’re willing to accept that it has a half-life of roughly ten minutes? I can’t believe this,” Eddie said.

Richie shoved their shared ordered animal style fries across the table and towards Eddie. “Eat these before they turn to cardboard,” he said. “We have about thirty seconds.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. He grabbed his plastic fork and poked and prodded at the top of the fries. They were smothered in melted cheese and sauce and topped with caramelized onions. Richie explained to him that this was a secret menu option people liked to order because it made them feel special. “It looks like puke.”

“You have to get a full bite. Like, cheese and onions and sauce, all of it together,” Richie said. “Otherwise we could have just ordered plain fries and put a sauce packet on them. There are rituals.”

“Rituals,” Eddie said, and he deftly maneuvered the fork around until he had constructed a perfect bite, which he then ate, and looked very displeased with it. “Greasy.”

“Oh, yeah. Extremely greasy. Do you like it?”

“I guess it’s okay as far as fast food goes,” Eddie said generously.

“It really is about the west coast superiority complex, I guess. What makes it good is knowing that other people can’t have it,” Richie said. “We can have it whenever we want, whether it’s good or not, and they can’t have it at all. I’m sure there are things in New York City like that. I don’t know. Bagels?”

“I don’t eat bagels,” Eddie said. 

“Of course you don’t eat bagels,” Richie sighed. “Whatever. Try your burger.”

Eddie tried his burger, and said that it was also okay, and then he poked around in his calorie counting app for a moment and seemed satisfied. Richie considered that a win.

While Eddie was pecking away at his food like a bird, Richie went to the front counter to order Beverly’s lunch.

The same girl who had taken their order the first time was still at the register, looking glassy-eyed and bored as the lunch rush dissipated into nothing more than a few scragglers scattered around the restaurant. She took his order once more, rang him up, and then looked at him funny, twisting her mouth around like a cartoon character trying to make a difficult decision. “Hey,” she said, “you’re Richie Tozier, right?”

Running into C-listers at restaurants is a standard L.A experience, so it never surprised Richie when random people recognized him at strange moments in his life, like buying lunch for his fag hag while the love of his life sat ten feet away and neurotically researched the food hygiene practices of In-n-Out. He’d met plenty of fans when he was writing material for schlubby middle-aged men who hate their wives, and it was always deeply uncomfortable.

This girl was young, pink hair tied up in two symmetrical buns on top of her head, with a really trendy looking septum piercing. She had this cool, jaded, unaffected vibe about her that reminded him of Beverly at that age, and therefore, she was probably way too hip to be a fan of pre-Twitter folk hero Richie Tozier.

“Uh… yeah,” Richie said hesitantly, not quite able to discern if he needed to turn on the celebrity persona or stay normal lest this child tell her 2,000 Twitter followers that she saw Richie Tozier at In-n-Out and he was a weird, self-obsessed asshole. This was all very hilarious because, like, what? Was Richie scared of this teenaged girl? (He was absolutely scared of this teenaged girl.) 

She lowered her voice. “I think it’s really cool,” she said, “that you, like, came out.”

“Oh,” Richie said, surprised. “Well, thank you.”

“So, my best friend’s dad is gay, right? But he didn’t know until he was, like, hella old. He’s all happy now and lives with his boyfriend in Rancho Cucamonga. Can you imagine loving someone so much you’d move to fucking Rancho Cucamonga for him? Anyway, I totally get it. You gotta live your truth.” She smiled sweetly and then reached down to pull something out of her pocket. “Would you mind taking a selfie with me?” she asked, which Richie didn’t mind at all, so he took her phone and they discussed angles and filters and social media and if people were being nice to him and if she was allowed to tag him in the pictures.

“You can tag me, but you can’t tell people that I ordered food twice in one visit. I feel like that’s something only weirdos do,” Richie said.

“Deal. By the way, what’s your sign?”

“Pisces?”

She gasped. “Oh my God! Ugh, I totally see it.”

Richie had no idea what that meant. He chatted idly with her until the food was ready, which she passed off to him and then told him to figure out what his moon and rising signs were and come back soon so she could tell him about his personal and emotional shortcomings.

“Let your Pisces flag fly, Richie Tozier!” she called out to him as he and Eddie were halfway out the door.

“What does that mean?” Eddie asked.

“I don’t know, but I think she’s my new biggest fan,” Richie said. Once they were in the car and ready to face late-afternoon L.A. traffic, Richie took a moment to text Beverly and let him know that he loved her so much he was hand delivering only the freshest of In-n-Out to her. She sent him back an incoherent spread of emojis and told him to hurry because she was so lonely it was making her want to dip into Eddie’s prescriptions.

They listened to music on the way back to Richie’s house and didn’t talk much. Richie stole a glance at Eddie out of the corner of his eye every chance he could get, just to see him sitting there with Beverly’s food in his lap, typing away at texts to his wife and work emails, combing through Richie’s Spotify playlists until he settled on some new wave collection Richie had put together stoned out of his mind the week before. These glances felt stolen just because Richie couldn’t reconcile his last twenty-three years of aimless, passive misery with the overwhelming joy of just having Eddie near. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was taking something he wasn’t allowed to have.

And then he thought about it and figured yeah, he could imagine loving someone so much he’d move to fucking Rancho Cucamonga for him, or something like that.

By the time Richie, Eddie, and Beverly met up with Bill and Audra in Koreatown later that evening, Audra had already reserved their _noraebang_ room and then decided they should pre-game. They all huddled around Bill’s phone outside of the studio and tried to decide on a bar that suited their five wildly different tastes. This equaled to something that was both hygienic and suitably scummy, well-rated and pleasantly obscure. In the end, they decided on going to the bar just around the corner from the studio, because they couldn’t agree on anything they pulled up on Yelp.

“I love a good hole in the wall,” Beverly said, sighing wistfully. Audra was ordering their first round of drinks while the other four scoped out a good booth. “Look—close to the jukebox. I have a vibe to curate.” She pointed to an adjoining room that had a few empty booths along the farthest wall, a pool table, and the coveted old-fashioned jukebox.

Bill left to go help Audra with their drinks, leaving Richie and Eddie to settle into the booth while Beverly looked at the jukebox and picked out music.

“This place is disgusting,” Eddie said.

“It’s rustic,” Beverly said.

“Quaint,” Richie said.

“Charming,” Beverly said. “Richie, what’s that one song your dad was always listening to when he’d do dad stuff in the garage?”

“It was that song by America,” Richie said, but that was the most he could remember. Wentworth Tozier, may he rest in peace, was always tinkering away at weird projects in the garage. They were weird to Richie, that is, at age twelve or so, but were probably very meaningful and enriching for Wentworth. Practical execution of skills which Richie found painfully dull, so dull that he felt like he wanted to bash his head open on the concrete floor whenever Wentworth tried to teach him anything.

But Richie did like the cassette player and collection of tapes Wentworth kept in the garage. It was an impressive collection, too, transcending decade and genre. Wentworth died when Richie was thirty-three, unexpectedly. It was hard on Maggie’s heart to be alone after the funeral. After returning to California, Richie ended up immediately flying back out to Chicago to stay with her for a few weeks. He combed through that old box of cassette tapes one night when he couldn’t sleep and ended up taking a few of them home with him. Seventeen years later, Maggie still had the rest stored up in the attic.

“ _You Can Do Magic_ ,” Eddie said.

Beverly whipped her head around and give him a big smile. “That’s it, isn’t it? _You can do magic, you can have anything that you desire_ ,” she sang. She searched for the song and queued it up. 

“He taught me how to change a tire. That song was playing,” Eddie said. Richie faintly remembered this. Wentworth had thought Eddie suffered from a lack of a strong male role model in his life and that was what made him _that way_ , as Wentworth always said, but not unkindly. He tried to extend his fatherly wisdom to Eddie as much as he could, and Eddie did enjoy the attention as Richie was remembering.

Once Beverly was happy with the selection of music, she slid into the booth up against Eddie. Richie sat opposite of them, happy for the chance to just take them in. Look at them as much as he wanted, feel comfortable knowing they were there, and it wasn’t just a dream with the blurry, faceless silhouettes of people he was certain he loved but could never remember.

Audra and Bill joined them shortly, hands full of drinks, and Audra immediately ran back up to the bar to order a round of shots, just for good measure. She returned precariously holding four shot glasses in her hands with the rim of the fifth held tightly between her teeth and set them on the table. Then she squeezed in up against Beverly, which pushed Beverly into Eddie, which pushed Eddie up against the wall. Bill took out his phone and snapped a picture, Beverly and Audra looking exuberantly happy while Eddie looked tiny and angry.

“Okay,” Audra said, sliding shot glasses down the table. “Shots!” And the five of them threw back their vodka shots.

“I’m trying to get Mike over here,” Beverly said, slamming her shot glass down on the table. “Wouldn’t it be so fun if Mike were here?”

“Where is Mike even?” Bill asked, following suit with his shot glass.

Beverly took a minute to swallow down the bitter aftertaste of vodka, making an ugly face and shuddering. “He mentioned that he was going to stay with Stan and Patty for a while, but I don’t know. Why doesn’t he tell us? I feel like he never tells us anything.”

“He’s probably still not used to telling us things,” Richie said, to which Audra said _awww_ very sincerely.

The last sign of life from Mike in their group chat was a few days prior when he sent a link to an NPR article on fracking, which Ben, Eddie, and Stan responded to in a way that indicated they not only read it, but understood it. The four of them proceeded to have a very intelligent, grownup conversation about the environment and then Mike simply floated away.

Just before leaving Derry, Richie had begged from the bottom of his heart for Mike to come stay with him in California for a while. This was before he knew Beverly was going to invite herself over and he was terrified of the excruciating loneliness that awaited. Mike said that he had loose ends to tie up and that maybe he would come visit sometime in the coming months, but they hadn’t talked about it again. Richie felt so crazy and stupidly desperate, tried to act like it was more for Mike than it was for himself, and then he had cried until he threw up over the guilt and stress and anxiety of a lot of things at once. Mike’s twenty-three lonely years in Derry. Killing Henry Bowers. So Mike ended up consoling Richie and that was the last thing Richie had wanted in that moment. They talked in circles for a long time, then Mike took Richie’s phone and helped him order one ticket back to California. He told Richie that they would see each other again soon.

Their conversation moved on to Stan and Patty, like five of them were a gaggle of gossiping PTA mothers. Stan was much better at keeping in touch than Mike was. He was in therapy, he and Patty were still planning to head out to Buenos Aires when the time was right, and he assured everyone he was doing well. The call to return to Derry seemed to have interrupted a genuinely picture-perfect life of marital bliss for Stan and Patty, so Stan was mourning a different sort of loss than the other six did when they considered the lost potential of their lives. It made sense that Stan would end up being the happiest among the seven of them, they figured, because Stan was determined and stubborn like that. Audra had to mediate for them when they veered off too far into melancholy and self-pity, because it wasn’t right for them to hold their own lives up against Stan’s and deem themselves emotionally bankrupt failures.

“Living with Bill since he came back from Derry has made me a certified clown trauma specialist now,” she said warmly, holding Bill’s hand across the table.

Then they moved on to Ben, which caused Beverly to tense up for a moment, and then settle back down as she was before. “So, he’s going on that spiritual retreat, huh,” she said. Her voice was steady, but she drummed her fingers over the surface of the table anxiously. 

“Yeah, over in Joshua Tree,” Richie said, watching her. She noticed. They both looked at each other judgmentally. 

“He’s going to be in Joshua Tree and he isn’t going to come visit us?” Bill asked, offended. “Isn’t that just, like, a hundred miles away?”

“What, and negate all of the therapeutic benefits of the spiritual retreat?” Eddie said.

“Ha!” Audra laughed. “I mean, sorry, you guys are all really normal!”

“Wait, wait, holy shit! Guys! I just remembered something hilarious! Remember,” Beverly said suddenly, throwing her arms out to get everyone’s attention and laughing so hard her shoulders were shaking, “when Eddie ran away from home! God, what dug that one up? Probably just the fact that we were all such fucking weirdos.”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie sighed, shaking his head. “I wasn’t a weirdo, I was trying to deal with a stressful situation!”

“You did _what_?” Bill yelled. “Oh, _fuck_! I remember, when you hid from your mom at Mike’s! In the barn! And she was practically on the phone with Barbara Walters before the night was out!”

“I _thought_ if I stayed there long enough then Mike’s family would have to adopt me. I’d had this insane argument with my mom that morning before school, so I just didn’t go home.”

“Your mom came over to my house to accuse me of kidnapping you. She was completely hysterical,” Richie said. “ _It’s just like that Jacob Wetterling_!” he cried, in a pitch perfect impersonation of Sonia Kaspbrak. That pulled Eddie out of his deluge of childhood embarrassment and got him genuinely, honest to God guffawing. “ _I won’t sit here and watch my Eddie become the next Adam Walsh! I won’t do it!”_

“Oh my God,” Audra said, her eyes wide with a look of morbid fascination. “Eddie, your mom…? She was bad to you?” 

“Munchausen by proxy is what they call it, apparently.” 

Audra gasped. “ _No_.”

“This was back when no one called CPS,” Bill said. “The woman was insane. She would twist the doctor’s arm for bullshit prescriptions. He had his own set of issues even without, you know, everything else.”

“Eddie,” Audra said, reaching over and grabbing his hand with a comforting squeeze. “That’s so Hollywood. You should write a book!”

“Gypsy Rose Blanchard,” Beverly said, unprovoked. “That girl who killed her mom. From the news.”

“No. She asked her _boyfriend_ to kill her mom. Her internet boyfriend,” Richie said. “And now she’s in jail.”

“She’s in jail even though she didn’t do anything?”

“Well, she orchestrated the whole scheme.”

“ _After_ a lifetime of abuse! She was _right_!” Beverly said passionately. Audra nodded in agreement.

“Wait,” Eddie said, “are we of the belief that it’s okay for people to murder their parents? Is that what you guys are saying to me right now?”

“It’s called moral relativity,” Bill said pretentiously.

“Was it okay when Dee Dee Blanchard forced her daughter to eat through a tube and use a wheelchair her entire life?” Richie asked.

“Well, obviously not!” Eddie said, appalled. 

“Eddie,” Beverly said, pausing to take a sip of her gin and tonic. “I’m gonna be honest. If you had asked me to kill your mom, I totally would have. Like, if you’d caught me in the middle of an episode? No questions asked.” She looked at Bill and Richie for validation.

“Well…” Bill said, at the same time Richie said, “I mean, if he asked me _really_ nicely, you know, said pretty please and all that.” Beverly nodded, pleased with the response.

“Any one of the others would say the same,” she said with a shrug.

“Is that so? Are you sure? Are you really sure about that?” Eddie said hysterically, and Beverly burst out laughing.

“Okay, okay, I’m mostly kidding!” she said, reaching out and pinching Eddie’s cheek. “But really, your mom was a terrible person. I’m sorry. I really hated that bitch.”

“She wasn’t well,” Eddie said. “And she was just trying to do what she thought was right.” It was diplomatic and there wasn’t much feeling to it. The older Eddie got, the worse Sonia Kaspbrak’s treatment of him became, and the angrier he would get at Richie for saying anything about her. It became more and more difficult for Eddie to excuse and justify her behavior, and the only thing he could think to do was lash out. Richie was well aware of this and readily offered himself up as a target for Eddie’s emotional catharsis. It had been different with Beverly, probably because of their shitty parent solidarity, and Richie was glad they shared that together. 

“It all sounds very _Mommie Dearest_ ,” Audra said. She put on her best Faye Dunaway impression and said, “TINA! Bring me the ax!”

“NO WIRE HANGERS, EVER!” Richie and Beverly yelled in perfect unison, then grabbed each other’s hands across the table and laughed, since they thought themselves to be the funniest people in the room. 

“These two are so fucking obnoxious,” Bill said of them, and he excused himself to order another round of shots. Audra followed to help him carry the glasses back to the booth. They returned quickly and the five of them continued to drink, becoming comfortably warm and tipsy. After that, they agreed that one more round of drinks would have them drunk, but functional.

The jukebox started to play _You Can Do Magic_ and Beverly still remembered all the lyrics despite not having heard it in years. She sang dramatically to Audra, “ _You know darn well when you cast your spell, you will get your way, when you hypnotize with your eyes, a heart of stone can turn to clay_ —” Bill recorded a video and sent it to the group chat and they were all pleased when Mike instantly texted them back, ‘ _Is that America? Mr. Tozier’s favorite band???_ 😄😭’ And then he told them that he missed them very much.

The hour of their _noraebang_ reservation approached, so they cleared the tab—Bill cleared the tab, rather, and Richie teased him about always needing to martyr himself in any possible way. Bill said it was because Richie was still effectively unemployed, and he was always trying to reach out to the less fortunate. Audra smacked him on the arm and gave him a stern look, but Richie just laughed, so boisterously it came out more like a dog barking, and Bill lovingly elbowed him in the side. Eddie gave them both a scathingly judgmental look and Beverly pinched his cheek, right over his scar, which was increasingly becoming her favorite thing to do to him.

They stumbled out onto the street and waited at the crosswalk for a green light. Audra and Beverly were giddy, arms linked, and laughing together like manic schoolgirls. They demanded Bill take pictures they would post on their social media once Beverly felt like she was safe to reintegrate into regular society. Bill, a lightweight, was too drunk to take any photos that were even remotely in focus. Eddie watched him take the blurry photos over his shoulder but did nothing to correct him. And Richie watched Eddie, watching Bill, because Eddie was there and Eddie was alive and nothing else seemed important at the moment.

The girl at the check-in for _noraebang_ was a lovely young woman named Eunbi, probably a college student working weekends to keep herself afloat in the city. Richie made a mental note to leave her a generous tip at the end of their session, for the sole reason that they were probably a lot louder than they realized and she was being very sweet about it all. She led them back to their reserved room and explained the menu, the options for alcohol and snacks—“But I can see you guys took care of drinks before you got here,” she said with a giggle.

“We did! That was just a warmup, though, can you bring us some soju? The peach kind— _Chum Churum_!” Audra said excitedly, with very practiced pronunciation of the Korean brand name.

“Sure thing, and you guys know how to use the remote to select songs?” Eunbi asked, doing a headcount to see how many bottles she needed to bring them.

Audra gave her a dramatic salute and she left them to their business. The walls of the room were stark white, a little drab with the overhead lights on. The lights were then lowered to a dark purple and a multi-colored light machine started spinning circles of red, blue, and green across the walls. It was like being in a music video from the eighties only none of them were on cocaine, regrettably. They sat close together on the cracked vinyl couch. Audra and Beverly rapid-fire listed off songs they wanted to sing, but Bill was given the privilege of picking out the first song since he had so tragically lamented that he never got to sing the songs he liked.

His first choice was _Don’t You Want Me?_ which he performed as a duet with Audra. They both sang terribly and Beverly arrhythmically shook the customary tambourine. The lyrics flashed in bright letters across the screen of a large, aged plasma television mounted to the wall, but all five of them new this song by heart, so they weren’t needed.

Eddie was holding the large remote used to input song selections and looking through the song book with a very determined look on his face, like he was completing some important task at his important job. Richie asked him, “How much Hall and Oates are you going to queue up?”

“Listen, asshole, there’s a reason why they have thirty-four Top 100 hits, because they’re _good,_ they make _good music_ , and you _never_ understood that,” Eddie said.

“Eds—hey, listen to me, Eddie. You’re out of touch. I’m out of time. And I’m out of my head, when you’re not around,” Richie said, grinning. Eddie tossed the remote over into Richie’s lap with a restrained, tight-lipped smile, like he was trying not to let Richie know that he was having a good time.

The next song started to play, a dramatic melody that Richie recognized, but only barely in this diluted, synthesized form. It reminded him of being in the car with his mom, sort of, because she always liked power ballads. Beverly grabbed Eddie by his good hand and pulled him to his feet, waving one of the microphones in his face. “Eddie! I picked this one for us! It’s our song!”

“In what context was this ever our song?” Eddie asked, confused, but he allowed Beverly to drag him to the front of the room.

She opened the song, completely off key, “ _I hear the ticking of the clock, I’m lying here, the room’s pitch dark. I wonder where you are tonight, no answer on the telephone. And the night goes by so very slow, oh, I hope that it won’t end, though… Alone…_ ”

Ah, yes, Maggie had always been a big fan of Heart back in the eighties, but Richie was more of a _Barracuda_ guy himself. The chorus kicked in, so loud that Richie couldn’t hear Bill and Audra’s conversation right next to him. Beverly grabbed Eddie’s hand. The two of them sang, looking deeply into each other’s eyes, barely able to get any of the words out for how hard they were laughing. “ _’Til now, I always got by on my own, I never really cared until I met you, and now it chills me to the bone. How do I get you alone? How do I get you alone_?”

Bill leaned over to Richie and yelled over the music, “Remember when they danced to this and I wrote a whole creepy goth-boy poem about it?” he asked.

“Yes, you fucking idiot,” Richie yelled back. “At one of those dances the school held after football games, right?”

“Yeah, Beverly didn’t want me to ask her to dance, so she made Eddie dance with her to keep me away. And I had a very real meltdown about it. Jesus Christ, I was such a stupid creep.”

“You really let yourself feel threatened by Eddie,” Richie yelled. “Like, the one guy who came to bat for you more than anyone else.”

“Right! Right, I was the fucking worst! I was out of my mind!”

While Bill was saying this, Audra rested her head on his shoulder and smiled up at him fondly. They had a good relationship, which was weird, because everything Bill had drunkenly told Richie in Derry indicated the opposite. It might have had something to do with all of Bill’s latent trauma upheaving itself and giving Audra a clearer picture of who, exactly, she married, and she seemed to like that person quite a bit. Richie was proud of them for coming out on the other side when he had rather pessimistically been anticipating a divorce announcement soon after they all returned home. Richie had not returned to California in the best of sorts, however, so maybe he was projecting.

Audra yelled, “Do you like Belinda Carlisle?” as Beverly and Eddie finished their duet.

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Richie said.

“Okay, sing this one with me,” she said, taking Eddie’s microphone from him and going to the front of the room. Even with the shitty lighting, the evening taking its toll on her hair and leaving her eye makeup smudged from sweat, Audra looked movie star beautiful. “ _I remember I was in the tanning salon when I heard that River Phoenix was gone,_ ” she sang dramatically, holding a clenched fist over her heart.

Eunbi peeked her head through the door and then opened it all the way with her shoulder, precariously holding a tray full of soju. Richie helped her unload the bottles on the table and she gave them a cheerful thumbs up before shutting the door behind her. Bill opened everyone’s drinks for them while Richie pried the second microphone out of Beverly’s hand.

He was always a sucker for a California anthem. Together, he and Audra sang, “ _It took a lot for me to say, I want to walk away, L.A., from the sharks and the chardonnay, in California… in California_ ,” while Bill supportively shook the tambourine from the couch.

Afterwards, Bill decided the evening needed a drunken rendition of _Wuthering Heights_ by Kate Bush and he delivered, for better or for worse. Audra pulled out her phone to record a video. “This will humble him tomorrow,” she said. She was smiling at him like he hung the moon.

The peach soju Audra picked for them was syrupy and sweet. She ordered them a second round while Beverly reached her true former grunge girl apex with Alanis Morisette’s _You Oughta Know._

Their body heat in the tiny room made the air muggy, almost like they were in a sauna. Richie was sitting beside Eddie, their legs touching, and Eddie had that drunken blush across his cheeks that always made Richie’s heart melt when they were teenagers. Maybe it was okay for them to pretend that it was twenty years ago, and they were new to the city. They were young and had all the time in the world for each other. They had time to save themselves. One night getting drunk and screaming the lyrics to all of their old favorite songs in Koreatown wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the lost years. But at least it was something.

When their second round of drinks got to them, they were in the middle of a Hall and Oates medley in honor of Eddie and their hour was reaching its end. “Should we go for another hour?” Audra yelled, struggling to make herself heard over Beverly and Eddie’s passionate rendition of _Kiss on My List_.

“I’m tired,” Bill yelled back.

“I want another hour!” Beverly said into her microphone, which made her point seem all the more compelling as it reverberated through the speakers, and then she continued singing, “ _And if you insist on knowing my bliss, I’ll tell you this_ …”

“Beverly squeezed her grunge girl shit into the set list at the cost of _my_ Donna Summer,” Richie yelled.

“I can’t do another hour, I’m dying up here,” Eddie said into his microphone while Beverly cheerfully continued performing, unaware, beside him.

“Fine, fine,” Audra yelled. She continued yelling, even as the song faded, “Then everyone finish your drinks so we get what we paid for! Waste not, want not, bitches!”

Bill ordered an Uber for the five of them. They made sure to leave the room in the best shape they could manage, empty soju bottles left sitting in two perfectly uniform lines. Then they emptied out all of their cash to tip their gracious and patient hostess.

The air outside was a biting sort of cold, but the city was alive in its youthful, intimate, warm way. Bars were packed. The muffled sound of music from the studio was just barely audible over the usual discordant nightlife noises. Maybe Richie was biased since he had been living in L.A. for most of his adult life, but it felt like the greatest place on earth in this exact moment. He’d had his ups and downs with the city, but hindsight rather easily revealed most of his enduring emotional problems to be the result of moving through life with the ambiguous feeling of stepping down hard on a missing stair.

“We really are old, guys,” Beverly groaned, coming down from her _noraebang_ high, her cheeks all red from the alcohol and residual heat from the tiny room where she sang her heart out. “My knees hurt. Just for no reason. Eddie baby, don’t tell me you ditched the fanny pack on the one night I actually need something from your supply.”

“Fanny pack!” Audra cried, delighted.

“Sorry, Bev, if you’ll remember you and Richie rushed me out of the house and I didn’t have _time_ —”

“Because you were taking forever!” Richie interjected. “You were taking _forever_. Beverly, back me up here!”

“No,” Beverly said insanely, “you peer pressured me into rushing Eddie out of the house and I’m the one who suffers for it.”

“Wait, I ordered us a big Uber, are we all going back to mine and Audra’s?” Bill asked, watching the little dot on his phone that represented their approaching car. “We have like four guest rooms, so it’s fine.”

“Mr. Four Guest Rooms over here,” Beverly said.

“And we can get hangover breakfast tomorrow morning,” Audra said. The car pulled around the corner and up to the sidewalk. She spoke over her shoulder, “We’ll go to Norms, but not the one closest to the house because usually people there take pictures of me and I’m going to snap one day.”

“Babe,” Bill said, holding one of her hands to help keep her steady as she climbed up and into the large SUV waiting for them. It was sweet, Richie thought.

“I know, world’s smallest violin, right!”

Bill and Audra lived in Beverly Glen. This was insane to Richie, which Eddie thought was hilarious, because as far as Eddie was concerned, he was currently in the presence of four abhorrently wealthy people with no lifestyle differences in between any of them. Their home was tall, Mediterranean style with big, vaulted ceilings and a winding marble staircase in the foyer. It looked appropriately lived in, which was unusual for rich Hollywood types, who often liked to keep their homes sterile and lifeless. There were books and coats scattered around, an unfinished puzzle was on a charmingly rustic coffee table in the sunken living room, and the television had been left playing _Seinfeld_ on mute. 

“If we had—I mean, you know, not that I like to think about it now,” Audra said, kicking off her shoes at the front door, “but if it had all ended in divorce, well. This house would have probably been the biggest mistake of our fucking lives.” She showed them all to the wet bar, which she said mostly served as a conversation piece lately, as they tried to keep most of their drinking social and outside of the home. Something about the way energies meshed and words that Richie understood individually but didn’t really get otherwise. He did most of his drinking at home, because he had an alcohol dependency, and that was that.

They congregated around the bar, pulling the neatly arranged stools into a crescent moon formation, and drank expensive vodka straight from the bottle. Audra put on music while Bill went upstairs to grab a box of pictures his mother had sent to him once he called her and asked if she remembered his old friends from Derry.

There were pictures of Georgie interspersed and Bill recalled each memory with crushing clarity, and he cried, and the rest of them cried with him. They took painful moments crystallized and split them open, took grief that had metastasized in their minds and bodies and sliced out the tumorous misery. They did this together, which didn’t make it easier, but made it tolerable.

“I’m optimistic,” Beverly said, wiping her eyes and laughing softly at the sorry state of them all. “I really am! You know, everything’s going to be okay. For all of us. I’d bet my life on it. We’re going to do the things we want to do. And even if we can’t live together in a big house, we’re going to be a part of each other’s lives.”

“We _can_ live together in a big house,” Bill said, drunk and crying.

“I think what Bill means is that all of you are welcome here at any time,” Audra said, pulling his head against her chest and petting his hair. “If you ever need anywhere to go,” she added, and then she looked at Beverly, and then she looked at Eddie, and this made Richie wonder if there was secret information threading itself between everyone but him.

“You’re moving to California, right, Eddie?” Beverly asked, nudging Eddie with her elbow, teasing him in the way she did when she knew she needed to be gentle.

“I don’t know,” Eddie said lightly, which hit Richie like a lightning strike to a key. That was something. That was _something_ , Richie didn’t know what, but it meant something.

They soon drank themselves exhausted. Audra showed them upstairs and left them to babysit Bill in the guest room where Beverly had already been making a temporary home. She needed to scour the house to find something of Bill’s that would fit Richie well enough for him to sleep in. “But Eddie, you should be fine. I’ll be right back!” she called over her shoulder.

The room consisted of a California king sized bed, unmade, with sweaters and dresses and stockings hanging over the bedframe. A loveseat sat next to a bookcase in the corner that was stocked mostly with Bill’s own writing, which was delightfully and unoffensively tacky of him. A glass door led out to a balcony that overlooked the rear patio, the swimming pool, and the neighborhood’s sloping hills in the distance.

“Your wife is having to dig through all of your tiny baby clothes. Do you feel emasculated in your own home, Big Bill?” Richie asked, nudging Bill with his foot. They were all cozied up on the bed, Beverly curled up in between Richie and Eddie while Bill laid longways over their legs. 

“That’s just offensive, Richie,” Eddie said.

“Fuck you,” Bill grumbled.

“It’s hilarious is what it is,” Beverly said.

“I feel like I’m sitting in my mansion house on piles of money that I share with my beautiful wife,” Bill slurred. 

“That’s _tasteles_ s, Bill,” Eddie said.

“Extremely tasteless!” Beverly said. 

“Absolutely the most tasteless thing I’ve ever heard,” Richie said.

Audra returned a few minutes later with a neatly folded stack of clothes in her arms. “It’s the best I could do,” she said. She tossed two items over to Eddie and them dropped the rest onto Richie’s lap. “He has the shoulders of a Cabbage Patch Kid. I’m sorry. Maybe one of these will fit you.”

“Richie, I think I stole some of your shirts when I left your house, actually,” Beverly said, crawling over everybody and off the bed. She crouched down on the floor like some type of cave dwelling beast and sifted through the contents of her suitcase.

“Okay, I’ve got to put the drunk baby to bed,” Audra said. “Richie, Eddie, whichever rooms you two want, seriously, have at it. Bathrooms are stocked with toiletries. Text me if you need anything.” She grabbed Bill’s arm and gently pulled him to his feet, blowing them three kisses before leaving them to settle in for the night.

“We’re having a sleepover, right? You’ll stay in here with me?” Beverly asked. She tossed a shirt over to Richie—it was an old, worn, stretched out shirt sporting the name of state school in Northern California he didn’t attend. No real memory of where it came from, just one of those things that ended up in his closet years ago. Beverly had made a sleeping gown out of it. 

“But our sleeping rituals,” Eddie said.

“I’m not a fussy guy, Eddie baby,” Beverly said, yawning. “But I do keep the TV on.”

“I have to sleep in _complete_ darkness,” Eddie said rabidly.

“You’re fucking _drunk_ , you’re gonna fall asleep in like two minutes!” Beverly argued, pulling her discarded clothes from the bedframe and tossing them into her suitcase. “Anyway,” she said, walking over to the loveseat and collapsing onto it with a dramatic sigh. “I’ve been sleeping over here because I like how cool it gets next to the glass door. You two can have the bed.”

It was like all of Richie’s adolescent despair was manifesting itself before his eyes in the form of Beverly Marsh, plastered, unaware of the weight and implication of her words. Eddie, also plastered, was entirely unconcerned which left Richie feeling like Rose DeWitt-Bukater internally screaming at a high society dinner on the Titanic.

They played rock-paper-scissors to determine who got to make use of the bathroom first, because everything had to be some type of competition when any combination of the Losers were together. Eddie first, then Beverly, then Richie.

Once it was Richie’s turn for the bathroom, he stared at himself in the mirror and administered a fruitless pep talk to his inner neurotic fourteen-year-old. _Calm the fuck down, man, you’re gonna make this weird. It’s only weird if you make this weird. Like, what’s the big deal?_ The big deal being, of course, that Richie had spent nearly every day of his childhood going insane if Eddie so much as maintained eye contact with him for more than five seconds and he was just now adjusting to having Eddie back in his life again in a very complicated way.

He changed into his old shirt that now smelled like Beverly and stared disbelievingly at the sweatpants of Bill’s that Audra had optimistically given to him. They had tiny little legs for babies, which left Richie to sleep in his boxers, which was fine and comfortable, but felt like the equivalent of walking around with his dick hanging out while in the presence of Beverly and Eddie. Mostly just Eddie, who managed to look very prim and put together wearing Bill’s loaned Joy Division shirt and sweatpants.

Beverly and Eddie compromised on the television being left on as long as it was muted, so _Designing Women_ comfortingly illuminated the dark room.

“Sitcoms always made me think I’d spend every single day with you guys when were grownups,” Beverly said, curled up on the loveseat under a floral-patterned throw blanket. 

Eddie was already nearly asleep, sling left hanging off the corner of the bedframe, scrolling on his phone languidly. “Do you still thrash around in your sleep?” he asked when Richie gathered the courage to climb into bed beside him.

“Yep,” Richie said, even thought he didn’t. “All knees and elbows, so watch yourself.”

“Hmm,” Eddie said, locking his phone and reaching around behind him to drop it on the bedside table.

Beverly was asleep, snoring lightly.

Richie felt like his brain and his heart and his lungs had been thrown onto a charcoal grill. This burning ache in his chest was telling him that maybe he didn’t deserve this, maybe he wasn’t actually allowed to feel this deliriously joyful without some kind of condition, he hadn’t paid his dues to be this close to Eddie, he hadn’t earned it, and he was liable to lose it at any second.

Richie had spent twenty-three years holding nothing close enough to fear its loss and now he was sharing a bed with the first and only person he ever loved. It didn’t matter how Eddie returned that love, all that mattered was the privilege of being close to him in any capacity. The day Richie left Derry, eighteen years old and suffering the cataclysmic destruction of his world as he held Eddie’s hand for the last time, he learned that love and fear are mirrors of one another, because you cannot separate love and the fear of life without. Then he forgot. And then he went back to Derry, he saw Eddie, he remembered, he saw Eddie _die_ , and he experienced that fear in its entirety for the first time in his life. His fear of losing Eddie again was equal to if not greater than the love he felt. It lived in the same chamber of his heart. It was a part of him the same as his own arm.

“Hey, Richie,” Eddie said. His eyes were heavy, barely open, Richie would have mistaken him for asleep if he hadn’t spoken. “Thanks for having me.”

“You should be thanking Bill and Audra, since we’re at their place,” Richie said. He wanted to reach out and touch Eddie’s face. Run his finger along the scar on his cheek.

“You know what I mean, Rich,” Eddie said with a small smile. He rolled over and was asleep soon after. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi. 
> 
> content warnings: use of the c-word, f-slur, internalized homophobia, audra and beverly are assholes about organized religion, bill and beverly like Sublime. 
> 
> thank you to everyone who let me use your twitter names for this chapter!! i sadly didn't get to use everyone but believe me i tried. thank you to the hypothetical fake BTS stan i made up also, i know you're out there somewhere <3

Richie found himself feeling as if he was being crushed to death, which was concerning.

His threat assessment was piss poor due to the fact that he had very little recollection of where he was, only that he wasn’t in his own bed. When he opened his eyes, bleary from a poor night’s sleep, he saw red hair. He remembered where he was, the hangover began to set in, he realized Eddie was beside him, and his stomach felt like it was being crushed by several dumbbells—figuratively, literally, whatever. There was a lot for him to process in his delicate state.

“Hey. Good morning.” Beverly was sitting literally on top of Richie, uncomfortably straddling him with her legs around his torso. He blinked and blinked until his vision cleared just enough see that she was holding both of their phones in her hands. “Can I log you out of Twitter?” she asked. “Like, change your password?”

Beverly, as Richie remembered her as a young girl, was typically not one to lie, or conceal things, or sneak around, or panic, or do anything that normal people with a healthy amount of worry, shame, and self-preservation tend to do. But this morning, her voice was pitched up just the slightest bit and she sounded almost rehearsed, like she had been running this conversation and all of its potential outcomes through her head for some time. 

“Uh,” Richie said. He didn’t have the mental capacity to try and figure out what type of script she was wanting him to follow with this. He said, “I don’t know, Bev. Can you at least tell me why?” It wasn’t the first time someone had suggested he stay off of Twitter in a very meaningful way. The difference this time being that he was usually privy to whatever catastrophic meltdown he had caused beforehand.

Even without his glasses, he could catch that distinct eyebrow furrow of hers, that _I’m not getting my way immediately_ look. Now that the Losers were back in his life, Richie figured he should go and get a natal reading to explain what caused him to spend his entire life cosmically endeared to assholes, especially pertinent now that he was spending nearly every day in a three-to-tango with the biggest and most beloved offenders from his childhood.

“It’s nothing, but I think you should stay off Twitter for a little bit,” Beverly said vaguely.

“Not really inspiring confidence,” Richie said. He was starting to get worried. Coming out and adjusting his career trajectory and taking his meds was supposed to be the denouement of the first half of his shitty life. He really didn’t have the emotional capacity to deal with anything more stressful than, like, LA traffic at this point.

“Please shut up,” Eddie groaned beside them, flipping from where he had turned to face Richie in his sleep over to his stomach and pulling his pillow over his head. “This is very irritating,” he said, voice muffled.

“Sorry babe,” Beverly said, somewhat dispassionately, like she wasn’t sorry at all, like she was distracted by something much more pressing that Eddie’s eight hours of restorative sleep. “You don’t use Twitter, do you, Eddie?”

“Never in my life,” Eddie said. Then he fell back asleep. 

“I’m changing your Twitter password,” Beverly said, turning her attention back to Richie. Not a question this time. “And I’m holding on to your phone. I promise it’s not bad. And we’ll talk about when we get back to your place.”

“Oh, you’re inviting yourself back?” Richie asked. He reached up and grabbed for his phone just to annoy her. She forcefully yanked her hand away from him.

The worst he could imagine was that a mean op-ed had been written about him and Beverly wanted to preserve his feelings for as long as she could. A lot of mean shit had been written about Richie in the wake of his coming out and his reaction typically ranged from amusement at the vitriol he managed to inspire in others to genuine despair that he was never going to be able to recover from the shitshow of the last two decades of his life. If Beverly didn’t want him to see something, maybe it was actually… really, really bad, despite her claiming otherwise.

“Richie. Yes,” Beverly said. Very sincerely. Very earnestly. Very…? Desperately.

“Fine, yes, okay,” Richie groaned, too tired to deal with this. He brought his hands to his eyes and pressed down against his pounding headache until it hurt a little in that way that felt kind of good, too. Pressed down hard enough until he could see patches of colors shaped like amoebas moving behind his eyelids. “You can stay with me for literally as long as you want. You know that, right?” he asked.

“I know,” Beverly said. She gracelessly moved from on top of Richie down into the space between him and Eddie. “Considering I’m planning on marrying you after I divorce my husband, I would hope you’re okay with me living with you.”

Richie turned over on his side to look at her. She was holding the two phones clutched tightly against her chest. Richie was familiar with this—the energy she was radiating, the rain cloud of negativity hanging over her head. It was strikingly similar to what Richie would describe as an inevitable cliff dive after a manic episode. But maybe not really a cliff dive, that would imply some level of control and the assurance of a safe landing. It was more like falling off of a high-rise and turning into a disfigured pile of meat on the pavement below.

“You know,” Richie said quietly, reaching out and brushing her hair out of her eyes, “whatever it is, I’m going to find out eventually. If it’s really bad, Steve’s gonna, like. Show up at my house later. He may also just kill me at this point, so. Whatever.” Then he grabbed her nose between his thumb and index finger and twisted really hard.

“Yeah. Well,” Beverly said, smacking his hand away and trying to keep her laughter down as Eddie whined at them to be quiet again. “Let’s just try and have a good day. We’ll talk about it later.”

Neither Richie nor Beverly ended up getting anymore sleep, but they stayed in bed and talked quietly together as to not further disturb Eddie. The late morning sun was peeking in through the curtains, streaks of light moving in waves over Beverly’s face. Everything felt so quiet and safe, like a peaceful grotto carved out from the rest of reality. And despite her annoyingly gruff and surly approach to things, this was what Beverly was trying to ensure.

Beverly, bored of the stillness and silence, eventually got out of bed to pack up her bag. The sound of her shuffling around the room woke Eddie up for good. He instantly grabbed his phone and started answering work emails, which didn’t strike Richie as being normal human behavior. But Richie didn’t have the energy to tease him about it this morning. Just watched the way he set his jaw, the way the tendons in his wrists moved as he tapped away at his phone.

“How’s Mrs. Kaspbrak?” Beverly asked, sitting on the floor and neatly folding all of her clothes and the many t-shirts she’d pilfered from Richie’s closet.

“She’s fine,” Eddie said briskly. “Wants to know if Richie’s house has cripple stud construction in case of an earthquake.”

“It doesn’t, sorry,” Richie said, but he didn’t know what that meant. “I specifically told the realtor that if she showed me a house with cripple stud construction I would just start breaking shit.”

Beverly gasped. “The arrogance of Californians, _”_ she said. “The hubris.”

“Myra thinks that… well, there’s no way to say this that sounds even remotely normal. She thinks California is going to sink into the ocean within the next ten years or so,” Eddie said.

“Oh my God,” Beverly said, her eyes widening comically. “Was she upset when you told her you were coming over here?” she asked.

“A little,” Eddie said. He paused. “A lot, really. It’s been… unpleasant, ever since Derry. It’s unbearable some days, honestly.”

This topic of conversation was not in Richie’s wheelhouse. He decided to let Beverly take care of it. She was unalarmed, still organizing her clothes in her bag. “You gonna be my divorce buddy?” she asked, straight to the point. There was a weightlessness to her tone that would easily allow it to be passed off as an insensitive joke while sounding just serious enough to show she really meant it.

Eddie was silent for a moment. And then he said, “Maybe.”

Richie especially didn’t really know what to say to that, so he put his hand on Eddie’s shoulder and gave him a gentle, comforting squeeze. He didn’t let it linger for longer than necessary. Eddie looked over at him with that unintentionally pleading look in his eyes.

Once the seven of them had reached high school, Richie found Eddie to be completely inscrutable most days. As if that wasn’t infuriating enough, it seemed he was the only one among the Losers left unable to keep up with Eddie and his strange, fleeting moods. For someone as belligerent and mouthy and ingratiatingly bossy as Eddie, he was impossible to read in the quiet moments in between. That hadn’t changed about him over the years. In fact, it seemed like it had only gotten worse.

If he wanted something from Richie, if he needed something from Richie, then it was unclear. He smiled at Richie, sadly, and then looked back over towards Beverly and said, “This isn’t really thought I would be at forty.”

“Midlife crisis squad assemble, huh,” Beverly said. “It’s just me and you, Eddie baby.”

“Hey, I refuse to be left out of this club. I was a forty-year-old closet case!” Richie said, desperate to lighten the mood just a bit. “Ben is crying somewhere in the fucking desert. No way, it’s not just you two.” 

Beverly laughed and it faded out into a sigh. “We’ve got a lot of fires to put out, I guess,” she said quietly. She zipped up her bag and joined the other two back on the bed. They argued over who deserved to use the bathroom to get ready for the day first. Eddie ended up winning, since he’d benevolently allowed Beverly to keep the TV on while they slept even though he hated it. 

Soon Audra knocked on the door and said it was an optimal time to hit up Norms for a late breakfast, early lunch outing. This pulled Richie back into the real world. And in the real world, Beverly was chewing nervously on her bottom lip. In the real world, Richie had to avert his eyes to stop himself from staring as Eddie changed out of Bill’s shirt. In the real world, Richie was performing a delicate and perilous balancing act of allowing himself to greedily, hungrily enjoy this closeness with Eddie, and stopping just short of utter delusion.

Such was the way it was always going to be.

The thing about Norms was that even when it was a good time to go, it was still a pretty bad time to go. Never in Richie’s entire time in Los Angeles had he ever attempted to eat at Norms and not ended up waiting outside for at least thirty minutes. Every location across Southern California was hemorrhaging people all hours of the day, and today was no exception.

The five of them leaned up against the side of the building while they waited for their number to be called. Richie and Beverly passed a cigarette back and forth. It was early afternoon and the lunch rush was gradually tapering out of the restaurant—big families and a significant number of churchgoers from a Pentecostal church just down the street.

“What, like you’ve never waited outside for food before?” Beverly asked Eddie, who thought the four of them were fully insane for their willingness to wait any amount of time for anything.

“I try to avoid it,” Eddie said. “I just don’t have time for that. Standing around. Waiting on things.”

“New Yorkers are so impatient. They think they’re the only people who have ever been busy in their lives,” Richie said.

“That’s why I’m defecting,” Beverly said.

“We could just go to Denny’s,” Bill said.

“No, Billy, it just isn’t the same,” Audra sighed. She shivered, then linked her arm with Bill’s, pulling him close to her to her for warmth. There was a rather unseasonable chill in the air for this time of day. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “Church crowds are the worst. It’s like… go home, I’m hungry.”

“Seriously,” Beverly said, taking a drag. “It’s embarrassing.”

“You are both _completely_ rotten inside,” Richie said, taking the cigarette from her.

“So I’ve been told,” Beverly said. She gave him a devilish smile. 

Their number was soon called, and they were ushered inside by a very harried waitress with a pencil tucked inside of a messy high ponytail. She slammed their silverware down on the table and took all of their drink orders without writing them down before scurrying away and returning with five menus. She excused herself again, turned to walk away from the table, and just as quickly turned back. Then she leaned forward, speaking as quietly as would allow her to still be heard over the hum of conversation from the dining room.

“You look like that actress,” she said. Then she pointed to Richie and said, “And you look like that guy!”

This caused Beverly to laugh raucously, grabbing Richie’s shoulder and shaking him. Eddie, once again smushed between Beverly and a wall, leaned over and looked at Richie with that distinctively judgmental, discerning gaze of his.

Admittedly, it made Richie feel some sort of way that Eddie was seemingly so very unimpressed by anything about Richie’s decently successful Hollywood status. It reminded Richie of when they were kids and he would throw rocks at Eddie’s bedroom window to get his attention. Eddie would usually emerge looking shrewd and freakishly judicious, and Richie’s heart would be struck with that primal desire to do literally anything for an ounce of approval.

“That’s us!” Audra said, grinning. “The actress and the guy.”

“And you’ve chosen to grace our humble Norms,” the waitress said, probably trying to determine if she would be dealing with your average entertainment industry assholes today. Considering the location, right on the fringe of West Hollywood, her wariness was justified.

“It’s my favorite in the _county_ ,” Audra said.

“Well, we’re happy to have you today. I’ll be back in just a moment to take your orders, okay?” She left, looking a little more relaxed than she was before. Audra had that effect on people—she possessed a genuine feeling of warmth atypical of Hollywood darlings at her level of fame. It was probably her unfussy, approachable nature that allowed her to slide into so many places relatively unnoticed. Once one person spotted her, though, others were sure to follow. Richie could see a table full of people gawking and pointing a few feet away.

The five of them ordered a chaotic assortment of food and ate off of each other’s plates. Beverly decimated an egg and chorizo burrito and still picked off of Bill’s double order of hash browns. Eddie was notably unconcerned about allergies and macros, splitting an indulgently enormous stack of pancakes with Richie, which they couldn’t even finish between the two of them, so Audra grabbed their plate and had the rest.

While they were eating, Audra angled her phone so that everyone could see and showed them the videos she took from their night out, particularly all of Bill’s embarrassing _noraebang_ performances. She asked Richie if he had anything big planned for the rest of Eddie’s trip, which of course he didn’t, thus forcing Richie to make up plans on the spot.

“I was thinking the aquarium in Long Beach,” Richie said, because he remembered Beverly had mentioned she would like to go, back during her first week in California. They’d never made it over that way, or really anywhere, because they’d been too busy drinking and licking their wounds.

Beverly gasped excitedly. “Really? I’ve been wanting to go so bad! I can’t wait to see the otters.” 

“ _Summertime, and the living’s easy, Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras MG_ , _all the people in the dance will agree, that we’re well qualified to represent the LBC_ ,” Bill crooned terribly, in the spirit of Long Beach.

“They have a ray pool there,” Audra said. “It’s a shallow pool of water and you can pet the rays—I think there’s cownose rays and sometimes they have little sharks in there.”

“That sounds like a several bacterial infections waiting to happen,” Eddie said.

“You can’t leave California without petting a ray,” Beverly said. She pulled her phone out of her purse and brought up videos of cownose rays to sate her excitement for the time being. “They’re cute, Eddie,” she said, angling the screen towards him.

“They’re flat like pancakes,” Eddie said, his tone objective and serious like he was presenting hard, scientific facts to a panel of distinguished minds.

“Pancakes,” Beverly agreed.

“Hey… Have you guys looked at Twitter today?” Bill asked suddenly. He was scrolling through his phone with one hand and holding a cup of black coffee in the other. Looked like the spitting image of his dad, up early reading the morning paper.

“We’re on a Twitter hiatus until later,” Beverly said, not looking up from her phone. She moved her hand around in a large circle between herself and Richie. “We.”

“Ah,” Bill said, taking a sip of his coffee.

“I don’t use Twitter,” Eddie said.

“God, I wish I was you,” Beverly said.

“It’s better that way, honestly,” Audra said. “It’s a cesspool. There’s, like, fifty Twitter bots set up to call me a cunt every ten minutes, because some nerd guys heard a rumor that I was going to play Kitty Pryde in some Marvel show that was never greenlit.” She leaned over Bill’s shoulder and looked at his phone screen. Her eyebrows shot up, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Beverly’s been holding my phone hostage,” Richie said. He’d actually forgotten, which was nice while it lasted—who would have thought life was much more enjoyable when he wasn’t glued to abusive Twitter mentions and hounding emails from dozens of people who needed things from him yesterday. But, as Audra would say, world’s smallest violin.

“Yeah, and we’ve been having a really nice day, right?” Beverly asked, and sure. Yeah. It was fine. Richie had seen worse hangovers in his day. He wasn’t moping alone or otherwise surrounded by people he hated, for starters. That was new.

Once they had paid for their food and generously tipped their waitress, they were ready to go—unspoken Norms etiquette discouraged parties from lingering at their table for more than a couple of minutes, considering there was always a line out the door of people waiting to eat.

On their way through the parking lot, an anxious, rosy-cheeked woman stopped them in their tracks, holding her hands together as if she was praying and addressing Audra as she said, “I’m sorry! Uhm, hi, Audra, I’m a huge fan! I was just wondering if I could get a picture with you! And, uhm, you’re Richie Tozier, right?”

“Unfortunately,” Richie said, which earned him a gracious laugh. 

“My boyfriend loves you! He’s been hoping you’ll start doing shows again around town! But it’s great that you’re taking some time for yourself.”

Richie stared at her, slack-jawed and speechless from the knowledge that he had still had fans who were interested in seeing him perform live and people who were sympathetic to the plight of a depressed middle-aged funnyman whose life was a garbage dump largely of his own design. If you didn’t count the clown shit, of course. He managed to choke out something like, “Oh, uh, wow, thank? You,” and the woman smiled sweetly. 

“I’m good for a picture,” Audra said. She looked over at Richie. “Is that okay?”

It kind of wasn’t okay considering that Richie just wanted to get back to his house and learn what mockery the internet was making of him today, but he wasn’t going to be an asshole in a fucking Norms parking lot over being asked to take thirty seconds out of his day for a picture. The woman handed her phone to Bill. Famous enough to be rich, but not famous in the way that got him regularly recognized at restaurants. Lucky bastard.

As they were settling into a nice Instagram-worthy shot, Richie looked over to where Beverly and Eddie were standing a few feet away. Beverly was turned to Eddie, fussing over the collar of his shirt and the smoothing over wrinkles in his coat. She was standing over him, almost protectively, almost like she was trying to keep someone from seeing him.

Bill took several different variations of the same picture and the woman thanked them both, giddy with excitement from meeting her favorite actress and her favorite actress’s weird comedian friend. She did the well-intentioned thing where she tried to congratulate Richie for coming out without saying the word _gay_ and then she left them alone.

The weather outside had gone from overcast to gloomy over the course of their meal. Rain was potentially on the horizon. It would be nothing more than a light, California drizzle, if it ended up hitting their neck of the woods at all. The five of them hugged and said their goodbyes. Audra and Bill were both going to be busy all week, so it was likely the last time they would get to see Eddie before his flight home on Wednesday. Bill got stupidly emotional, then got mad at everyone for noticing, and then hugged Eddie so hard he accidentally got tangled up in his sling.

“I’ll miss you,” Bill said, crying.

“It’s not like you’ll never see me again,” Eddie said.

“Is it so wrong that I just want us all to be together forever?” Bill asked with the sincerity of a child.

“No. I guess not,” Eddie said.

“Well,” Bill sniffed, “Just come back soon, okay?”

Eddie said that he would try, and Bill and Audra went along their way.

Once they were back at Richie’s house, it was time to recoup. Eddie insisted they take vitamins and drink water and then he said they all smelled disgusting—like sweat and diner food—and that if he didn’t shower in the next five minutes he was going to snap. Richie also wanted to shower more than anything on earth, but this was probably the only time he was going to have in the foreseeable future to talk to Beverly without it seeming weird.

“We’re in a _drought_ , Eddie!” Richie yelled loud enough that Eddie could hear him in the guest room. “Don’t fuck up my PG&E bill!’

“ _Fuck_ you and your fuckin’ PG&E bill!” Eddie yelled back, and then shut the door.

Beverly piddled around the kitchen for a minute, grabbing a protein bar and a kombucha from the grocery haul she’d brought by the day before. She walked to the living room, tossing her overnight bag on the floor and making herself comfortable on the couch. “Trash TV okay?” she asked Richie.

“You know what I’m gonna say, Red.”

“Haha! Of course I do, babe.” Beverly turned on _Real Housewives_ and smacked the cushion beside her as an invitation for Richie to sit down. They watched TV for a while, laughing occasionally and giving each other a running commentary on what transpired between the wealthy ladies of Beverly Hills. As time passed, Richie could sense Beverly’s mood deflating. Finally, she leaned over and grabbed Richie’s phone out of her bag. She tossed it into his lap.

“Here,” she said.

Richie had often been told by his mother that worrying and frowning aged a person, but Beverly looked like a perfect recreation of her teenaged self with her brow furrowed and her mouth in a sharp upside down _v_ shape. And he loved her so much, painfully so, because she had never given him anything less than her best, even when her best was nothing but rough edges.

“I changed your Twitter password to _ilovedick666_.”

“Aw, come on,” Richie said, unlocking his phone and sifting through the text and voicemail notifications, mostly from Steve. A lot of _call me!!!_ and _Richie you need to call RIGHT NOW!!!_ and most confusingly: _You said you would let me know before you went public with a boyfriend!_ “Passwords are supposed to be secure, Beverly.”

Beverly smiled despite herself. “I’ll be more careful next time.”

He opened his messages from Steve and scrolled up to the earliest one, figuring that would be a good place to start. There were several screencaps of a TMZ article.

**EXCLUSIVE!!! Recently OUT Richie Tozier seen with NEW BOYFRIEND in Santa Monica?**

**_Richie Tozier_ ** _—recently in the headlines for coming out as a gay man after a career built on misogyny and shock jock style humor—was spotted by a fan at the Santa Monica Pier with an unidentified man who appears to be—_

The stupid, garden variety tabloid blurb was the least of Richie’s worries. He was more concerned with the fact that there were pictures of him and Eddie included. It was obviously nothing incriminating, just the two of them walking together, talking, looking at each other as people are wont to do when they’re spending time together.

Most of the pictures were blurry and out of focus and someone would have to really be up Eddie’s ass as a person to be able to recognize him in some shitty quality zoomed in pap photos—that is, coworkers and acquaintances back in New York probably wouldn’t be able to tell. Did Myra Kaspbrak read TMZ?

But the real issue—the issue of Richie’s garbage pride and shriveled up ego and his shitty heart—was that Richie looked so obviously stupidly lovesick in these photos that it was sincerely fucking embarrassing. Like, he now completely understood why Beverly didn’t want him to see these first thing in the morning. He wouldn’t have gotten through breakfast without having some weird sobbing fit in the middle of the restaurant and stirring up more TMZ headlines. It was mortifying. People could smell it on him. Jesus Christ.

“Fuck,” Richie whispered, scrolling further down to see the rest of Steve’s messages. _Richie, look, it’s okay and I want you to be happy, I just wish you had told me first_ was the most recent one. He looked up at Beverly desperately. “Eddie’s going to be so fucking mad at me.”

“Eddie’s _not_ going to be mad at you,” Beverly said. “It’s a ridiculous thing to be _mad_ about.”

And then Eddie plopped down on the chaise, startling both Richie and Beverly, who had been staring so intensely at each other Richie could feel his ocular nerves bulging inside his eyes and hadn’t noticed him enter the room. “Mad about what?” he asked.

Eddie was freshly showered, changed into a light t-shirt and sweatpants, his hair was damp and messy, his sling was hanging uselessly off of his neck, and he looked unreasonably adorable. This was probably the innermost circle of a hellscape personally tailored to break Richie’s spirit completely. Eddie was going to get weirded out and never want to talk to Richie again after this. Any normal, self-respecting straight, married man had a right to exist without being assumed to be some washed up, hack comedian’s boyfriend. Self-loathing, internalized homophobia was _bad_ , unless it was Richie, in which case it was valid and justified, because Richie sucked.

Wait—no, Richie was catastrophizing. That’s what his therapist would say. Eddie was looking at him with those big, earnest eyes, not an ounce of bitterness or doubt in them. This was _Eddie_ and the two of them had made it through far more trying times than a stupid fucking celebrity gossip website speculating on the basis of literally nothing. Speculating—what, emotional intimacy? God forbid. It was fine. It was _fine_.

“So,” Richie said stupidly. “Uh.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Beverly said.

“Prefacing something by saying it’s not a big deal makes me feel like it actually is a big deal,” Eddie said calmly, and that was fair. He folded his hands in his lap and looked back and forth between Richie and Beverly expectantly. When neither of them said anything, he regained his usual grouchy countenance. “Okay, now you’re just pissing me off.”

“Some people on the internet think you’re—my—you know,” Richie said, gesturing vaguely with one hand. He wanted to literally scream _please God don’t make me say these words out loud_ which wouldn’t be apropos for the given situation.

Even though Richie felt like a corpse sitting inside of a crematory oven, there was nothing inherently happening to him that was going to turn up the temperature and reduce him to a pile of bone fragment. Eddie was not trying to make him feel this way. This was inward. This was less like a cremation and more like spontaneous human combustion. 

But looking in Eddie’s eyes like this, it was difficult to feel like anything was okay. All Richie really wanted to do was go back in time and find the version of Richie that thought it would be possible to both vomit his melodramatic adolescent despair at Eddie’s feet and continue living like a normal person as a part of Eddie's life, and tell himself to just fuck off. Fuck off back to LA and enjoy Eddie being a part of his life in a healthy and comfortably distant way and leave well enough alone, forever.

Because there was something too humiliating about this and it wasn’t on Richie’s terms. Four years of being called a faggot in the halls of Derry High were paradise compared to the idea that anyone on earth, strangers, could look at him and think, _wow, this sad sack of shit is really in love with— This closet case loser is pathetically in love with—_

Richie had spent his entire adult life hiding a major part of himself with reasonable success. That success hinged on the fact that Eddie Kaspbrak wasn’t a part of his life then.

This wasn’t catastrophizing. This was just reality.

Then Eddie nodded and said, “Ohhhh,” very quietly, like something was dawning on him. “Oh, you’re saying people on the internet think I’m your—well, that we’re dating? Or something? Right?”

“Yeah,” Richie said. “That’s, uh. That’s it. That’s what people are saying.” He pulled up the TMZ article and handed his phone over to Eddie, who took a moment to thoroughly observe every line of text and every pixel on every photo.

“God, I really don’t want to believe that the back of my head looks like that. They couldn’t have taken any better pictures?” was his final statement as he handed the phone back to Richie. “

“Eddie,” Richie said, letting out a pained laugh. “You’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad?” Eddie asked.

Despite the tension slowly dissipating among the three of them, Richie could very clearly hear Beverly grinding her teeth beside him. She was also being suspiciously quiet. Her hand was resting on Richie’s shoulder and she was fiddling with the fabric of his shirt.

“I know it’s a little a strange. And invasive and weird. I just didn’t want you to be uncomfortable, Eddie,” Richie said, lifting his shoulders up a bit, just to move into the comfort of Beverly’s touch. “You know. To be around me.”

Eddie had that weird, lobotomized sort of calm about him. “It doesn’t bother me, Richie. It’s fine. You guys really had me scared there for a minute.” He paused. “Are you sure _you’re_ not uncomfortable? Because you seem kind of… upset.”

And then Richie could physically feel it happening—that stupid dumb dopey lovesick look on his face, the same one from the pictures. He couldn’t control it. Being completely and totally stupid over Eddie was ingrained in his DNA. There was a joke in here, somewhere. He was going to find it if it killed him. Otherwise it was just pathetic. Sad, forty-year-old gay man is happy for scraps of affection from his straight, married best friend who is okay being seen in public with him. They were like _Degrassi_ for old people or something.

“I’m cool, Eds. It’s all good. It’s just normal, like, C-list celebrity stuff,” he said, trying to be normal.

“Don’t call me that. And C-list is generous,” Eddie said.

“Oh, ouch! I _love_ that you keep me humble,” he said, and the air felt very much cleared. He figured then that he may as well face the music of the unrestrained public, so he unlocked his phone and opened the Twitter app. “Let’s look at some social media carnage.”

“Remember what your new password is?” Beverly asked. Richie knew her well enough to tell that she was trying very hard to regain her normal composure. Like splashing your face with cold water or pinching yourself to stay awake.

“Yes, Beverly, I remember,” Richie said.

“It’s _i-love-dicks-666_ ,” Beverly said, drawing out each syllable. 

“ _Beverly_ ,” Eddie said with the voice of a disappointed but loving parent. 

“I couldn’t think of anything else!” Beverly said defensively.

Richie logged in while Beverly and Eddie scooted in close on either side of him. Beverly perched her chin on his shoulder. It reminded him of the way they used to read comics together in the clubhouse. Richie opened his Twitter mentions, not really knowing what to expect, but was relieved to see that it was all pretty much par for the course. Dry, slightly insensitive speculation. A few jokes that probably would have sent him in a suicidal frenzy ten years prior. But overall, it wasn’t that bad. They began to scroll.

 **@lordbastard69**  
_i can’t believe **@trashmouth** comes out of the closet and immediately lands a cute bottom while i haven’t been on a date in MONTHS!!!!!!!! i am SICK!!!!!!!! _

“That’s presumptuous,” Eddie said.

“That’s sweet, Eddie, they said you’re cute!” Beverly said.

 **@trashmouthtour  
**_i know it’s wrong to speculate but he looks so happy in the pics so i’m_ 😭 _ **@trashmouth** I LOVE YOU _😭 _  
_

**@curiousair  
** _wait are we for fucking real stanning Richard **@trashmouth** fucking Tozier after all the fucked up shit he’s said??? seriously?????? _

**@kirbyluvr69 _  
@curiousair_** _are we going to cancel him for shit he said like 15 years ago? it’s over, he apologized!!!_

**@curiousair _  
@kirbyluvr69_** _HE CALLED JAMIE LYNN SPEARS A C*NT WHEN SHE WAS ON ZOEY 101_

“Should I apologize to Jamie Lynn Spears?” Richie asked. 

“No, then everyone will expect you to apologize to literally everyone for _everything_ you’ve ever said,” Eddie said, like a seasoned Hollywood sociopath. “Do you want to spend the next year of your life doing an apology tour at this point in your career?”

Richie could barely handle the thought without feeling sick. That had more potential to bring his career to a screeching halt than the fact that he killed a guy in Maine, probably. Maybe next time, Jamie Lynn Spears.

**@messwithlove** _  
Anyone who thinks **@trashmouth** is a top is just lying to themselves GOD the eternal bottom energy is just radiating from him LMAOOASJGLKSDJGH ugh good for you, king_

**@lesbianjjk _  
@messwithlove_** _WHAT THE FCK, seriously with the outdated stereotypes about gay men? You cannot tell someone is a top or bottom just by looking at them!!!! ANYWAY stream BLOOD SWEAT AND TEARS_

**@wormsquirms**  
_i thought **@trashmouth** was homewrecking william denbrough and audra phillips. disappointed to find out this isn’t true. unstanning _

“Oh, that’s funny,” Eddie said.

“Come on! You’re _way_ too good for Bill,” Beverly said. “Retweet that one, though.” 

**@skeilig_**  
_Our world is on the edge of destruction and I get online to willfully dissociate from it all only to be forced to think about **@trashmouth** having sex. Ok fine if you insist. _

**@messwithlove**  
**_@skeilig__** _imagine the lack of self-esteem…..imagine the tears…… WE’RE ROOTING FOR YOU **@TRASHMOUTH**_

“Their understanding of your psychological profile is just… amazing,” Beverly said. “I’m not even sure why you’re wasting your time in therapy with these guys keeping you on the straight and narrow.”

Richie was able to put off the inevitable for a while longer—the fact that he needed to call Steve—and finally decided to bite the bullet after stumbling across a Twitter thread that opened with _WHY RICHIE TOZIER IS ACTUALLY A STRAIGHT MAN LARPING AS A GAY MAN AS A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT, A THREAD_ which somehow managed to be homophobic, biphobic, sexist, and antisemitic all at the same time.

He stepped outside on to the rear patio, still able to hear to Beverly and Eddie’s muffled conversation through the glass door. The wind was blowing too hard to bother fighting to keep a cigarette lit and this made him all too aware of just how uncomfortable he was feeling. It was in the same way he’d get as a kid when he couldn’t sit still in class and this was treated as a minor annoyance by his teacher when it felt like a terminal affliction to Richie. Like the only thing with the power to bring on any sense of relief would be literally tearing his skin off.

It was cloudy and dark. Richie hoped Eddie would come visit again next summer so he could see LA at its most beautiful. He hoped Eddie would come back and decide to stay forever. The pool in the backyard was covered with a tarp and the air smelled heavily of chlorine. He never really used the pool and had thought about getting it filled in for a couple of years now. He had thought about doing a lot of things with his house that he never got around to, just because he didn’t care. While he had come back from Derry with some helpful feelings of enlightenment and the comfort of a loving support system, it wasn’t quite enough to kick his ass into caring about pretty much anything. Maybe it ignited a tiny flame of self-awareness in the sense that his friends loved him and so, by proxy, he needed to care for himself in order to not worry them. But the daily, mundane aspects of his life were still not clicking.

His thumb hovered over his phone screen. He needed to learn to care about things in the next ten seconds if he was going to get through this conversation with Steve without firing him and saying fuck it to the whole thing—committing himself to continuing to create this reformed identity that somehow felt just as disingenuous as before. He was forty years old. He had enough money in the bank to fuck off for the rest of his life. He should do that. There was nothing stopping him from doing that. He wasn’t brave enough to do that. He wasn’t confident enough in his ability to exist without constant attention PICC lined directly into his body. Fuck.

He tapped his phone screen. Steve answered nearly instantly. “Richie fucking Tozier. Explain yourself.”

“Okay,” Richie said. “I’m a grown man with a life and also not glued to my phone 24/7. Hope that clears things up for you.” 

“Listen. I’ve been busting my ass trying to set up some good, social media friendly publicity dates for you. And this is how you treat me? I’m wounded, Rich. Really.” The infuriating thing about Steve was that he meant all of this. From the moment Richie bombed his last show, fucked off to Maine, killed a guy, and offered himself up for public crucifixion by way of allowing a three-decade long sexuality crisis to answer everyone’s burning questions of what the fuck was wrong with him, Steve had been putting out dumpster fire after dumpster fire. So what? He wanted Richie to go on a publicity date and act like a normal person? Was he really asking for so much? Yes, actually. He was. 

So Richie decided to repay him for all of his hard work by acting like a petulant child. “I don’t _want_ to go on social media friendly publicity dates. I _want_ you to leave me alone.”

“Okay, fine,” Steve said through gritted teeth. “Fine. Tell me about the guy—how’d you meet him? Is he an actor? What’s the deal? Is it serious? Is he in the closet? Do we need to make a statement? Give me the details.”

“He’s not—fuck, Jesus Christ, man. He’s not _the guy_ , he’s,” Richie said. “Eddie. He’s Eddie.”

“Oh,” Steve said, instantly calmer, like he’d been sedated. “One of your Maine buddies?”

“Yes, one of my Maine buddies. Do I have your permission to be seen in public with my friends without a notarized document?” 

“Richie. Buddy. Pal. Baby. You know that’s not what I’m saying here. I just want you to be careful. I don’t like waking up and seeing you on TMZ when we’re working on your image. I’m on _your_ team.”

“Yeah. I know, Steve,” Richie said. He was running out of steam in record time. No fight left in him. It was a good thing. He was getting too old for pointless, petty push-back against literally anyone trying to extend to him an ounce of goodwill. Even if they were only doing it because he was paying them good money.

“Okay, look. I’m sorry for jumping the gun. I’ll leave you alone for today. We can even end this on a good note—I’m loving how much time you and Audra Phillips are spending together. She’s nice, she’s good company, people like her. Keep it up,” Steve said. It was all business as usual, but Richie knew an olive branch when one was dangled in his face. He would accept it.

They ended the call and Richie went back inside. Beverly was gone to shower and Eddie was curled up on the couch watching some boring, educational documentary. They sat together, didn’t talk much, and when they did talk it had nothing to do with TMZ headlines or blurry paparazzi photos. Eddie’s hair was air drying with the slightest hint of curls forming. And all Richie could think was that he wanted Eddie to love it here so badly. He wanted Eddie to stay. He wanted Eddie to make this his home.

“ _Me and my girl, we got this relationship, I love her so bad, but she treats me like shit_ ,” Beverly was singing, her feet kicked up on the dashboard, cigarette hanging out of the partially opened window to keep the smell from permeating into the interior of the car. They had just hit the Long Beach city limits.

“This is horrible,” Eddie said from the backseat. “I hate Sublime.”

“You need to respect Long Beach culture,” Beverly said. “ _On lockdown like a penitentiary, she spreads her lovin’ all over and when she gets home, there’s none left for me_ …”

“I think he’s talking about you, Bev,” Richie said, and she flipped him off with a wry smile.

The weather was nicer today. A little brighter, not quite as cold. Since it was a Monday afternoon, there probably wouldn’t be a large crowd at the aquarium and Long Beach was, in general, far more lowkey than LA. This was admittedly more for Beverly’s sake than trying to avoid more TMZ headlines about Richie Tozier’s mystery man. There would be significantly more fallout if she were spotted cavorting around with some random men while her marriage and company were hanging in the balance. She said it wasn’t a big deal, but she was always saying things weren’t a big deal and Richie was starting to not believe her.

Once they were parked, they decided to walk around outside for a few minutes, to enjoy the nice weather. They looked at the fountain sitting in the middle of a small roundabout, decorated with a graceful sculpture of two dolphins. There was a small park that was built in the shape of a spiral to resemble a seashell, close enough to the water that they could watch seagulls traipsing around on the sand. Beverly said they should stay at the Queen Mary and Eddie said no, absolutely fucking not.

They started out wandering around aimlessly once they were inside, first coming across a small theatre setup that played a short, educational film about the various sea creatures living in the aquarium. Richie squirmed around for the entire fifteen-minute show because he would much rather actually see these creatures in person than watch a movie about them, but Eddie and Beverly watched with such focused intensity he couldn’t bring himself to bother them about how painfully boring this was for him.

Next to the small theatre was a lighting arrangement that made the carpeted floor look like it was under water and reacted when people walked through, which Beverly splashed around while she mapped out a circular route that would lead them to the otters while not skipping over all the other things they wanted to see. There were some tiny, glass boxes of coral and various ocean vegetation a few feet away, so they decided to start there.

“When I was little, my… Uh, my dad told me there are river otters all over Maine.” Beverly was standing up on her toes, leaning up against Eddie’s back to see inside of a mirrored box that made a colorful arrangement of coral look like it went on forever and ever. “But I never saw one myself.”

“I’m sure they like to stay away from people,” Eddie said. He was reading the small plastic fixture at the front of the glass case that detailed the health and lifestyle of the coral. 

“Hey,” Beverly said, “I was reading that they have a restoration program and you can watch them nurse all the sick coral. Let’s go find it. Then the ray pool, then the otters.”

The display for the coral restoration program was a large, floor-to-ceiling glass tank of pale, washed out, sickly looking pieces of coral, sticking out like a sore thumb among the rainbow-colored menagerie in the other tanks. They read about the tireless work the aquarium was putting into nursing the coral back to health and then had to leave rather quickly, because Eddie said seeing all of the sick coral made him feel sad. 

“You big ol’ softie,” Beverly teased him, and he accepted this with a resigned shrug.

They moved on to the jellyfish displays and Richie watched Beverly put impressive effort into taking very artistic photos of them, which he noticed she was sending to Ben. Ben was in Joshua Tree and not using his phone for the time being, which Beverly knew, so she was probably loading him up with nice messages to come back to once he was spiritually renewed.

As desperate as Richie was for a clear understanding of what was going on between the two of them, he decided not to say anything. Ben was going to love the jellyfish pictures and that was all that mattered.

Finally, they found the interactive ray pools. This was the busiest display they had stopped at so far, dozens of people circled around the shallow, asymmetrical pools with their hands in the water, waiting for a ray to swim by.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Eddie said warily. “I mean, they’re filthy. And the water—people just stick their hands in it all day.”

Beverly pulled up the sleeve of her sweater to her elbow and dipped her hand in the pool. A ray swam by quickly and she barely missed it. “Oh, they’re fast!”

Rolling up the sleeve of his overshirt, Richie joined Beverly at the side of the pool. He tested the temperature of the water with the tips of his fingers. It was freezing. He dunked his hand in the rest of the way. Children on the other side of the pool were giggling and squealing as their hands brushed over the rays.

“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t be able to handle this, Eds,” Richie said, looking back at Eddie over his shoulder. Beverly pushed an aggressive burst of air out of her nose as she realized what he was doing. He turned back towards the pool. “Right, Beverly?”

“Mmmhmm,” Beverly hummed. “I was thinking the same thing, honestly. And that’s okay! It’s okay to have your limits, Eddie.” She stretched her hand out further and missed another ray. “Dammit!”

Eddie stammered some string of belligerent, enraged nonsense behind them, and Richie could hear the sound of fabric rustling. “I hate it when you assume things about me, goddammit,” he grumbled. Then he shoved his way up to the side of the pool in between Richie and Beverly, the sleeve on his good arm rolled up, and let his hand hover over the surface of the water.

The three of them craned their necks and Beverly stood up on her toes to give herself a better look at the other side of the pool. One of cownose rays was quickly circling back around. 

“Okay,” Beverly said quietly to herself, taking up a predatory stance. “This bitch had better be ready. Because I’m going to pet him or die trying.”

“Hey, Richie?” Eddie said, and Richie was instantly struck with the feeling of his fourteen-year-old heart trying to beat its way out of his chest. It was that very particular tone of voice that Eddie only used with Richie as a kid when no one else was around. When he needed favor, when he wanted to copy Richie’s homework or didn’t have enough money for a movie ticket and needed Richie to cover for him.

“Yeah, Eds?” Richie said, his voice sounding all thin and anxious. Goddammit. Eddie could literally ask Richie to dive headfirst into the ray pool with the explicit goal of breaking his neck and he’d do it no questions asked.

“Don’t call me that. Will you do it with me?” Eddie asked, nervously flexing his fingers.

“I mean, yeah, that’s why I have my hand in the freezing cold water,” Richie said.

“No, idiot, I mean—” Eddie grabbed Richie by the forearm and pulled his hand up and out of the water. Then he maneuvered his hand underneath Richie’s. “Like this.”

“Oh,” Richie said, shutting down on a molecular level. Beverly looked back at them and then quickly and wordlessly turned back around. Richie closed his fingers through Eddie’s, squeezing over his palm. Eddie’s hands were small. He would probably literally murder Richie right there for saying as such. Anyway. Whatever. Just some platonic hand-holding between two friends at the ray pool.

Eddie carefully lowered both of their hands into the water, wincing at the cold. The cownose ray Beverly had been eyeing turned around the curve of the pool and swam right under her hand. She squealed with delight and yanked her hand out of the water, splashing water all over Eddie’s overcoat. Before Eddie could start bitching, the ray swam under his and Richie’s hands. It was weird and slimy and cute. Richie’s cognitive faculties were trying their hardest at the moment, so that was the best he could do.

“It felt like algae on the side of a swimming pool,” Eddie said, letting go of Richie. He pulled his hand out of the pool and shook off the excess water.

It left Richie with this aching kind of emptiness. The gaps in his fingers now felt like open wounds.

A few feet away was a small metal sink where the three of them washed their hands repeatedly for nearly five minutes before Eddie was satisfied that they wouldn’t contract some strange waterborne illness. At Beverly’s insistence, it was time to see the otters.

Eddie and Beverly walked a few feet ahead while Richie trailed behind them, preoccupied with the loss he felt in the absence of Eddie’s hand in his. 

There was a large crowd at the otter exhibit and Beverly was discouraged when ten minutes went by and they still weren’t able to see inside the tank. People were taking their precious time getting pictures and videos and tapping on the glass to try and get the attention of the otters. Finally, Beverly let out a defeated sigh and continued walking along the corridor in the direction of the remaining exhibits, which were undoubtedly significantly less exciting to her. 

“Hey,” she said, turning around when she noticed that Richie and Eddie weren’t following her. “What gives? Let’s go.”

“We’re waiting for the otters,” Richie said.

“I feel bad holding you guys up,” Beverly said. She wrapped her arms around herself and hugged tight. Fending off love and sincerity and positive emotion. This wasn’t Richie’s first time at the rodeo. He knew Beverly’s game.

“You’re not holding us up,” Eddie said. “I’m quite literally not leaving this spot until I see those otters.”

“God,” Beverly said, making a big show of rolling her eyes. She walked back over to where they were standing, dragging her feet along the carpeted floor, and they waited until the crowd slowly dissipated.

By the time they made up to the tank, they were the only ones left at the exhibit. Beverly crouched down and silently watched as the otters flitted and floated around the water. One in particular twisted and turned its way over to the glass of the tank and rubbed its little hands together. Beverly gasped and lightly placed her hand against the glass. It stayed there for a moment, grooming itself by rubbing its face, and rolling around in a few circles before swimming off and under a large rock at the rear of the tank.

Three more otters emerged from under the rock, playing and swimming and interacting curiously with the fish in the tank. “They’re really happy,” Beverly said quietly. “And they’re safe in here.” And then her shoulders tensed up. She lowered her head. Eddie glanced over at Richie with a frightened, bug-eyed look at the realization that she was crying.

“Hey, Bev,” Eddie said. He crouched down beside her and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him. “You’re safe, too,” he said gently and she began to cry harder. He looked up at Richie, silently pleading for him to do something.

Richie reached down and wordlessly placed his hand firmly and heavily on top of Beverly’s head. She looked up at him, her face stained with tears, and looked like she was torn between sobbing and laughing. “It’s okay, Bev,” he said. “If it isn’t okay now, it’s gonna be soon. That’s a promise.”

“This is literally humiliating,” Beverly said, laughing at herself with a cruel kind of bitterness. It was enough to break Richie’s heart.

But Beverly never did care too much for much fawning and coddling, especially not from Richie. “What, you think you’re the only person to have a meltdown in front of the otter tank? You really think you’re that special?” he asked. “Get over yourself, Beverly.”

Beverly laughed again, lighter this time, not like she was laughing at herself and the years of agony. She flipped Richie off and turned back towards the tank. She wrapped her arm around Eddie and hugged him like that until they both lost their balance and ended up on the floor, and then she laughed some more. One of the otters swam up to the glass and did a bunch of flips at the surface of the water, like it was trying to cheer her up.

Once it was decided that they had hit all of the displays and exhibits they’d wanted to see, they were ready to go. Out in the main lobby, Eddie stopped very abruptly and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Guys, I’m sorry—just give me a minute. I need to call Myra and I may as well do it now,” he said.

“Go, go,” Beverly said, shooing him away. “We’ll just fuck around the gift shop.”

They ended up fucking around the gift shop for quite some time. They read all of the literature the aquarium provided about the work it did and the way the proceeds helped keep all of their aquatic friends happy and healthy. Beverly stopped at a large shelf covered in cute otter merchandise. She played a little with a tiny, fuzzy keychain of an otter holding a purple sea urchin.

“I’m gonna be honest,” she said, “just because I’m feeling weird and vulnerable. I think Eddie’s wife sounds like a heinous fucking bitch.”

“Jesus Christ, Beverly,” Richie said. Beverly didn’t often catch him guard like that, but he found himself genuinely shocked at the venom with which she spoke. Diplomacy wasn’t always her strong suit, but she had remained more or less neutral on the topic of Eddie’s wife up until this point. 

“Yeah,” Beverly said uselessly. “I’m gonna go out for a smoke since we’re probably going to be waiting for a while.” And then she left Richie alone. 

Richie watched her go. Then he looked at the little otter keychain, picked it up, and took it over to the register. The guy who rang him out asked if he wanted to make a donation to the aquarium and Richie said sure and donated a couple hundred dollars. Then the guy asked if he was Richie Tozier. Richie said yes and hoped the guy wouldn’t ask for a picture. He didn’t—he just smiled and pointed to the tiny rainbow flag pin stuck on the collar of his shirt. 

Outside, Beverly was hunched over, sitting on the curb close to the front entrance, cigarette hanging from her fingers. Richie approached her with all the care of someone trying to help a wounded animal, sat down beside her and handed her the otter keychain. She stared at it hard for a moment and then held it up against her heart. “You’ve always been too good to me, Richie,” she said.

“Right back at ya,” Richie said. She held her cigarette up to his lips so he could take a drag.

“This isn’t my strong suit,” she said, clutching the keychain tightly in her hand. “So bear with me. Okay? But I think… I owe you an apology.”

Richie’s first instinct was to tell her to shut up and never utter the word apology ever again, because he hated that kind of sincerity and so did she, so there was no point in putting themselves through that. But that wasn’t really how it worked with the people you loved, was it? Sometimes apologies needed to happen, and sometimes it was difficult to move forward without them. So he was going to hear her out, even if it sucked.

She continued, speaking with great intention and care, “When I told you to call Eddie, because you two weren’t talking, that wasn’t fair to you. You were… not in a great place about… all of that. I rushed you and I can see that this is actually kind of painful for you. All that TMZ shit kind of hit me like a ton of bricks, I guess. And I’m sorry. I know things aren’t _bad_ , but… I also know that it hurts. So. I’m really fucking sorry, Richie.”

“Beverly…” Richie started, and the sharp look on her face let him know that they were, like, really doing this. They were having a real, serious, adult conversation about feelings and owning up to transgressions and being honest with one another. “I appreciate the apology. Thank you. But I’m… okay, Bev. You know? I’m glad that Eddie’s here. I don’t, like, resent you for it or anything,” Richie said.

“You should,” Beverly said. “Kind of wish you did. I deserve it.”

“Come on, Bev, don’t be a martyr. You sound like Bill.”

Beverly let out a rough laugh, shaking her head. She took a drag of her cigarette. “I’m scared I blew it with Ben. I let him see it, you know. All of it. All of that repressed crazy. I lived twenty-three years of my life with all of this… rage festering inside me. I’m scared I don’t know how to treat Ben the way he deserves. And I think, with you and Eddie, I was just projecting how much I wanted everything to be nice and normal with Ben. He went to the fucking desert to get away from me, Richie.”

“Beverly, come on,” Richie said. Beverly held up her hand to shut him up, but that wasn’t fair was it? Beverly had gotten to say what she wanted, and now she wanted to end the conversation? He couldn’t even be frustrated at her. It was just hilarious how bad they were at this. “Look. He loves you. You’ve been taking your time figuring things out and we’ve all been super understanding. I think he deserves the same from you.”

“Huh,” Beverly said. “Yeah.” She paused. Inhaled and exhaled. Watched the traffic go through the roundabout. Then she said, without looking at Richie, “You know… Not to, like, rub salt on the wound or anything, but I always thought Eddie had a thing for you, when we were kids. He really liked you. I’d bet my life on it.” She passed over her cigarette. “You can finish it.” 

Richie dropped the cigarette on the ground and stomped it out.

Eddie was in a decidedly worse mood when he finally met back up with them, but he didn’t seem willing to explain why. Beverly attempted to pry, lightly and casually, but Eddie’s defenses were up completely, and he refused to talk about it. Beverly and Richie shared a look as if to say, _oh well_. 

The three of them agreed to skip their lunch plans in favor of ordering the most indulgent takeout they could think of once they were back at Richie’s house. On the road, Beverly put on Billy Idol and told Richie and Eddie that she was going to buy a ticket back to New York. She turned the volume up loud and sang the rest of the way home.

Beverly took an early flight out of LAX on Tuesday morning. Richie and Eddie dropped her off despite her insistence on taking an Uber, exhausted and still wearing their pajamas. They all hugged tightly, they cried, and they made weird, vague promises to each other that everything was going to be better soon. As she was walking away, Richie saw she had put the otter keychain on her carry-on bag. Eddie slept in the passenger seat on the way back to Silver Lake.

When Richie dropped Eddie off at LAX the day after, Eddie took his sling off so he could give Richie a full, proper hug. He held on to Richie tightly, head resting against his chest, and then winced as he pulled away and rubbed at the area of the fracture. Even thought it was mostly healed, it still sent the occasional shockwave of pain all the way down to his fingertips, he explained. Then he said, “I’m really going to miss you.”

“You can come back whenever you want,” Richie said. His voice was getting stuck in his throat. He wanted to cry, but that would probably be weird, so he stopped himself even though it was physically painful to do so.

“I know,” Eddie said, which seemed like a funny thing to say, considering the way Eddie was about most things. Or maybe it wasn’t so funny. Eddie knew. He knew that he had Richie in whatever he way he needed, without question. What he was going to do with that knowledge was anyone’s guess. “I will,” he said. “I promise.”

They hugged again. Then Eddie left him to go check his bags and wait for his flight back home, where his wife and his job and his house and his entire life without Richie waited for him, hermetically sealed away from the time the two of them had spent together in California. Richie suddenly felt like leftovers shoved in the back of the refrigerator, and he figured he could live with that feeling for the rest of his life if he needed to. He watched Eddie go until he was completely out of sight.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter!](https://twitter.com/hereditary_2018)


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